254 CHELIDONES. 



sound has been said to be the love-note of the beetles, which 

 are thus attracted from a distance by the sound of the birds 

 their love-notes and maternal and filial cries being those 

 by which all animals are most easily allured. 



The goat-sucker is a summer migrant, and does not arrive 

 till the middle of May, the time at which the cockchafer flies 

 in the evening ; and thougn it is not plentiful anywhere, it 

 contrives to capture vast numbers of those destructive insects. 

 It frequents the woods, and also the banks on the margins of 

 the pastures, where the beetles often settle, previous to de- 

 positing their eggs in the ground ; and under the trees, it is 

 just as active in the destruction of moths. It departs in the 

 end of August or the beginning of September, and rears, 

 during the interim, its brood, which are seldom, if ever, more 

 than two. The eggs are deposited upon the ground, under 

 the shelter of a tuft, and without any nest, and the young 

 have sometimes been mistaken for those of the cuckoo, to 

 which they have a faint, though but a very faint resem- 

 blance. 



When hawking for beetles, which of course it does at 

 beetles' height, that is, within a few feet of the ground, the 

 goat-sucker flies with its bill widely extended, and makes its 

 peculiar noise, but stirs the air but little with its wings. 

 When moth-hunting, its habits are a little different. It 

 glides round and round some tree, below which the moths 

 are often taking wing, on their courtship or predatory flights, 

 and as it catches a glimpse of a moth, it darts in and cap- 

 tures it, the glutinous matter with which the gape is lined 

 assisting in the process. 



The goat-sucker occupies alone a peculiar station in Orni- 

 thology, that of hawking on the wing for insects in the dim 

 twilight ; and as those which it chiefly catches are destruc- 

 tive ones, the larvae mostly being in the ground, and destroy- 

 ing the roots of plants, or in trees, and consuming their buds 



