486 THE ZOOLOGIST. 



AN OBSERVATIONAL DIARY OF THE HABITS 

 OF NIGHTJARS (CAPRIMULGUS EUROPJEUS), 

 MOSTLY OF A SITTING PAIR. NOTES TAKEN 

 AT TIME AND ON SPOT. 



By Edmund Selous. 



(Concluded from p. 402.) 



June 29th. — 9.15. I suppose the eggs to have been hatched 

 since 12.45 to-day, as I saw no sign of the young birds during 

 the nearly three-quarters of an hour I was there, and saw at least 

 one of the eggs projecting a little beyond the sitting bird's body. 

 It might possibly, however, have been the empty shell projecting 

 beyond the young bird as it lay under the mother's breast. 

 Shortly afterwards one of the chicks made two or three quick 

 little jumps upwards towards the parent bird's head, reaching its 

 beak to hers. She bent down her head, and taking, as it 

 appeared to me, the chick's bill in her own, she made two or 

 three times that particular motion with the head so well known 

 to those who have watched Doves or Pigeons feeding their 

 young by regurgitation from the crop.* The chick then crept 

 back under the mother bird's breast. Very shortly the other 

 chick came out and jumped up to the mother's bill in the same 

 way, and this took place two or three times. If it is not feeding 

 by regurgitation which takes place, I am at a loss to account for 

 the actions of both the parent and the young birds so strongly 

 resembling those of Doves and Pigeons under similar circum- 

 stances. During all this time the parent bird kept uttering a 



* I take this opportunity of stating from my own observation that the 

 parent Dove (that foreign species, at least, usually kept in confinement here) 

 regurgitates the food from her crop into the beaks of both her young ones 

 placed within hers at the same time. Not always, however; they are fre- 

 quently fed separately. Neither in Seebohm, Morris, Lydekker, Howard 

 Saunders, Prof. Newton, or the British or Chambers's Encyclopaedias, can I 

 find anything as to the Nightjar's feeding of its young, it being evidently 

 assumed that it does so in the usual manner. 





