56 
IN SHERWOOD FOREST. 
Mar., 1889. 
You have first to find a cock bird in song, and mark the 
tree to which he continually returns after little excursions 
in search of food. Somewhere under or near that tree the 
hen is sitting on her nest; your business is to frighten her 
off. My host uses a pocket-handkerchief tied to the end of a 
long stick, with which, by waving it to and fro about a foot 
from the ground, he can beat some extent of ground. Most 
probably the hen will slip off unobserved, but you will know 
at once when she has left her eggs, as her call note will be 
heard, and the cock will cease singing and go to her. The 
nest-liunter must then hide behind a tree-trunk, and keeping 
his eye on the hen bird, patiently watch until she goes on to 
the nest again. After flitting about for a time, she descends 
from the tree tops, and presently drops suddenly down to the 
nest and disappears. Haply you have marked her in, but 
very often she slips on unobserved, and you only become 
aware of the fact from hearing the cock resume his song ; in 
this case the whole process has to be gone over again. In 
South Oxon, where the woods are of a different nature, the 
nests are more easily found. A nest taken in Harlow Wood, 
in my possession, is composed of large grasses, bracken, dead 
leaves, and a little moss, and is lined with finer grasses, not 
hair, as stated by some authors, a fact first noticed, I believe, 
by my cicerone. 
The Nightjar is pretty common in these woods, frequenting 
the little open glades, especially on sheltered slopes, where 
among the heather and bracken it finds a secure resting-place 
during the day. In such situations the hen deposits her grey- 
marbled eggs on the ground. When flushed in the daytime 
they flit away with their peculiar glancing, buoyant flight, but 
seldom go far, and generally alight again on the ground. But 
occasionally they will perch on the branch of a tree, sitting, 
as is their invariable custom, lengthways upon it, when they 
are very inconspicuous. The way these long-winged birds 
will twist in and out through the branches of a low oak, when 
one happens to be in their line of flight, is really wonderful. 
Large white spots on the outer tail feathers of the male, very 
conspicuous in flight, serve to distinguish the sexes at first 
glance. The best view I ever had of a Nightjar on the 
ground was here, when an individual, which we flushed among 
some young timber, settled on an old green ant-hill at the 
foot of an oak only a few yards from me. Those great wood- 
ants, by the way, are most formidable creatures, capable of 
inflicting a sharp bite. They are very numerous in parts of 
this stretch of wood, and the keepers search eagerly for their 
nests in early summer for the sake of the ants’ pupae cocoons, 
