70 
THE NATURAL HISTORY 
[LETT. 
thought that those vast fens have not been sufficiently explored. 
If half a dozen gentlemen, furnished with a good strength 
of water-spaniels, were to beat tbeni over for a week, they would 
certainly find more species. 
There is no bird whose manners I have studied more than that 
of the caijrim ulgns (the goat- sucker) : it is a wonderful and curious 
creature, but I have always found that though sometimes it may 
chatter as it flies, as I know it does, yet in general it utters its 
jarring note sitting on a bough ; and I have for many a half-hour 
watched it as it sat with its under mandible quivering, and par- 
ticularly this summer. It perches usually on a bare twig, with 
its head lower than its tail, in an attitude well expressed by 
your draughtsman in the folio " British Zoology." This bird is 
most punctual in beginning its song exactly at the close of day; 
so exactly that I have know^n it strike up more than once or 
twice just at the report of the Portsmouth evening gun, which 
we can hear when the weather is still. It appears to me past 
all doubt that its notes are formed by organic impulse, by the 
powers of the parts of its windpipe formed for sound, just as 
cats pur. You will credit me, I hope, when I assure you that 
as my neighbours were assembled in a hermitage on the side of 
a steep hill, where we drink tea sometimes, one of these churn- 
owls came and settled on the cross of that little straw edifice 
and began to chatter, and continued his note for many minutes; 
and we were all struck with wonder to find that the organs 
of the little animal, when put in motion, gave a sensible 
vibration to the whole building ! This bird also sometimes 
makes a small squeak, repeated four or five times ; and I have 
observed that to happen when the cock has been pursuing the 
hen in a toying way through the boughs of a tree. 
After a lapse of twenty years the author adds the following to 
his " History of the Fern-owl or Goat-sucker :" — 
[The country people have a notion that the fern-owl, or 
churn-owl, or eve-jarr, which they also call a puckeridge, is very 
injurious to weanling calves, by inflicting, as it strikes at them, 
the fatal distemper known to cow-leeches by the name of puck- 
eridge. Thus does this harmless ill-fated bird fall under a 
double imputation which it l)y no means deserves — in Italy, of 
