CHAPTER II
One bird there is to whom these scattered fir plantations, with their surrounding, sandy territory, dotted here and there with a gaunt elder-bush or gnarled old hawthorn, are extremely dear, and that bird is the nightjar. Nightjars are very common here. If spruces and larches alternate with the prevailing Scotch fir, they love to sit on the extreme tip-top of one of these, and there, sometimes, they will “churr” without intermission for an extraordinary length of time. Sometimes it seems as if the bird would never either move, or leave off, but all at once, with a suddenness which surprises one, it rises into the air, and goes off with several loud claps of the wings above the back, and uttering another note—“quaw-ee, quaw-ee”—which is never heard, save during flight. After a few circles it may be joined by a companion—probably its mate—upon which, as in an excess of glad excitement, it will clap its wings, again, a dozen or score of times in succession. The two then pursue one another, wheeling in swiftest circles and making, often, the most astonishing turns and twists, as they strive either to escape or overtake. Often they will be joined by a third or fourth bird, and more fast, more furious, then, becomes the airy play. No words can give an idea of the extreme beauty of the flight of these birds. In their soft moods they seem to swoon on the air, and, again, they flout, coquette, and play all manner of tricks with it. Grace and jerkiness are qualities quite opposite to each other. The nightjar, when “i’ the vein,” combines them with easy mastery, and to see this is almost to have a new sensation. It is as though Shakespeare’s Ariel were to dance in a pantomime,[3] yet still be Shakespeare’s Ariel. As one watches such beings in the deepening gloom, they seem not to be real, but parts of the night’s pageant only—dusky imaginings, shadows in the shapes of birds. What glorious powers of motion! One cannot see them without wishing to be one of them.
I have spoken of the nightjar clapping its wings a dozen or score of times in succession. This is not exaggerated. I have counted up to twenty-five claps myself, and this was less than the real number, as the first tumultuous burst of them was well-nigh over before I began to count. It is not easy, indeed, to keep up with the bird, and when it stops, one is, generally, a little behind. The claps are wonderfully loud and distinct—musical they always sound to me—and I believe, myself, that they are almost as sexual in their character as is the bleating of the snipe. The habit has, indeed, become now so thoroughly ingrained that any sudden emotion, as, say, surprise or fear, is apt to call it forth, of which principle, in nature, many illustrations might be given; but it is when two or more birds are sporting together—or when one, after a long bout of “churring,” springs from the tree, and, especially, in a swift, downward flight to the ground, where its mate is probably reclining—that one hears it in its perfection. Why so little has been said about this very marked and noticeable peculiarity, why a work of high authority should only tell us that “in general its flight is silent, but at times, when disturbed from its repose, its wings may be heard to smite together,” I really do not know. The expression used suggests that the sound made by the smiting of the wings is but slight, whereas one would have to be fairly deaf not to hear it. And why only “when disturbed”? Under such circumstances the performance will always be a poor one, but it is not by startling the bird, but by waiting, unseen and silent, that one is likely to hear it in its perfection, and then not alarm or disquietude, but joy will have produced it—it is a glad ebullition.
The domestic habits of the nightjar are very pretty and interesting. No bird can be more exemplary in its conjugal relations, and in its care and charge of the young. Both husband and wife take part in the incubation of the eggs, and there is, perhaps, no prettier sight than to see the one relieve the other upon them. It is the female bird, as I believe, that sits during the day—which, to her, is as the night—and, shortly after the first churring round about begins to be heard, her partner may be seen flying up from some neighbouring clump of trees, and, as he comes, uttering, at intervals, that curious note of “quaw-ee, quaw-ee,” which seems to be the chief aerial vehicle of the domestic emotions. As it comes nearer, it is evidently recognised by the sitting bird, who churrs in response, but so softly that human ears can only just catch the sound. The male now settles beside her, churrs softly himself, and then pressing and, as it were, snoozling against her, seems to insist that it is now his turn. For a few seconds the pair sit thus, churring together, and, whilst doing so, both wag their tails—and not only their tails, but their whole bodies also—from side to side, like a dog in a transport of pleasure. Then all at once, without any fondling or touching with the beak—which, indeed, I have never seen in them—the female darts away, leaving the male upon the eggs. She goes off instantaneously, launching, light as a feather, direct from her sitting attitude, without rising, or even moving, first. In other cases the cock bird settles himself a little farther away, and the hen at once flies off. There are infinite variations in the pretty scene, but the prettiest, because the most affectionate, is that which I have described, where the male, softly and imperceptibly, seems to squeeze himself on to the eggs, and his partner off them. I have seen tame doves of mine act in just the same way, and here, too, both would coo together upon the nest.
In regard to the two sexes churring, thus, in unison, I can assert, in the most uncompromising manner, that they do so, having been several times a witness of it, at but a few steps’ distance, and in broad daylight, I may almost say, taking the time of the year into consideration. The eyes, indeed, are as important as the ears in coming to a conclusion on the matter, for not only is the tail wagged in these little duets, but with the first breath of the sound, the feathers of the bird’s throat begin to twitch and vibrate, in a very noticeable manner. Various authorities, it is true, either state or imply that the male nightjar alone churrs, or burrs, or plays the castanets, however one may try to describe that wonderful sound, which seems to become the air itself, on summer evenings, anywhere where nightjars are numerous. But these authorities are all mistaken, and as soon as they take to watching a pair of the birds hatching their eggs, they will find that they were, but not before, for there is no other way of making certain. It is true that the churr thus uttered, though as distinct as an air played on the piano, is now extraordinarily subdued, of so soft and low a quality that, remembering what it more commonly is, one feels inclined to marvel at such a power of modulation. But it is just the same sound “in little”—how, indeed, can such a sound be mistaken?—and, after all, since a drum can be beaten lightly, there is no reason why an instrument, which is part of the performer itself, should be less under control. What is really interesting and curious is to hear such a note expressing, even to one’s human ears, the soft language of affection—for it does do so in the most unmistakable manner.
Though, as we have seen, both the male and female nightjar help in the hatching of the eggs, the female takes the greater part of it upon herself, and is also much more au fait in the business—I believe so, at least. The sexes are, indeed, hard to distinguish, and, as the light fades, it becomes, of course, impossible to do so. Still, one cannot watch a sitting pair, evening after evening, for an hour or more at a time, without forming an opinion on such a point; and this is mine. We may assume, perhaps, that it is the female bird who sits all day, without once being relieved. If so, it is the male who flies up in the evening, and from this point one can judge by reckoning up the changes, and timing each bird on the eggs. This I did, and it appeared to me, not only that the hen was, from the first, the most assiduous of the two, but, also, that the cock became less and less inclined to attend to the eggs, as the time of their hatching drew near. So, too, he seemed to me to sit upon them with less ease and to have a tendency to get them separated from each other, which, in one case, led to a scene which, to me, seemed very interesting, as bearing on the bird’s intelligence, and which I will therefore describe. I must say that, previously to this, when both birds were away, I had left my shelter in order to pluck an intervening nettle or two, and thus get a still clearer view, and I had then noticed that the two eggs lay rather wide apart. Shortly afterwards one of the birds, which I judged to be the male, returned, and in getting on to the eggs—which it did by pushing itself along the ground—it must, I think, have moved them still farther from one another. At any rate it became necessary, in the bird’s opinion, to alter their relative position, and in order to do this it went into a very peculiar attitude. It, as it were, stood upon its breast, with its tail raised, almost perpendicularly, into the air, so that it looked something like a peg-top set, peg upwards, on the broad end, the legs being, at no time, visible. Thus poised, it pressed with the under part of its broad beak—or, as one may say, with its chin—first one egg and then the other against its breast, and, so holding it, moved backwards and forwards over the ground, presenting a strange and most unbirdlike appearance. The ground, however, was not even, and despite the bird’s efforts to get the two eggs together, one of them—as I plainly saw—rolled down a little declivity. At the bottom some large pieces of fir-bark lay partially buried in the sand, and under one of these the egg became wedged. The bird was unable to get it out, so as to bring it up the hill again to where the other egg lay, for the bark, by presenting an edge, prevented it from getting its chin against the farther side of the one that was fast, so as to press it against its breast as before—though making the most desperate efforts to do so. Wedging its head between the bark and the ground, it now stood still more perpendicularly upright on its breast, and, in this position, shoved and shouldered away, most desperately. After each effort it would lie a little, as if exhausted, then waddle to the other egg, and settle itself upon it; then, in a minute or two, return to the one it had left, and repeat its efforts to extricate it. At last, however, after nearly half-an-hour’s labour, an idea seemed to occur to it. It went again to the properly-placed egg, but instead of settling down upon it, as before, began to move it to the other one, in the way that I have described. “If the mountain will not go to Mahomet, Mahomet must go to the mountain”—that was clearly the process of reasoning, and seeing how set the bird’s mind had been on one course of action—how it had toiled and struggled and returned to its efforts, again and again—its subsequent, sudden adoption of another plan showed, I think, both intelligence and versatility. It, in fact, acted just as a sensible man would have done. It tried to do the best thing, till convinced it was impossible, and then did the second best. Having thus got the two eggs together again, it tried hard to push away the piece of bark—which was half buried in the sand—backwards, with its wings, feet, and tail, after the manner in which the young cuckoo—in spite of the anti-vaccinationists[4]—ejects its foster brothers and sisters from the nest. Finally, as it grew dark, it flew away. I then went out to look, and found that the bird had been successful in its efforts, to a certain extent. The two eggs now lay together, and though not quite on the same level, and though the piece of bark was still in the way of one of them, both might yet have been covered, though not with ease, and so, possibly, hatched out. However, had I left them as they were, I have no doubt that, assisted, perhaps, by its partner, the bird would have continued to work away till matters were quite satisfactory. But having seen so much, and since it would soon have been too dark to see anything more, I thought I would interfere, for once, and so removed the bark, and smoothing down the declivity, laid the eggs side by side, on a flat surface. I must add that whilst this nightjar was thus struggling to extricate its eggs, it uttered from time to time a low querulous note.
When the eggs are hatched, both parents assist in feeding the chicks, and the first thing that one notices—and to me, at least, it was an interesting discovery—is that they feed them, not by bringing them moths or cockchafers—on which insects the nightjar is supposed principally to feed—in their bill, but by a process of regurgitation, after the manner of pigeons. There is one difference, however, viz., that whereas the bill of the young pigeon is placed within that of the parent, the young nightjar seizes the parent’s bill in its own. Those peculiar jerking and straining motions, which are employed to bring up the food—from the crop, as I suppose—into the mouth, are the same, or, at least, closely similar, in either case. I have watched the thing taking place so often, and from so near, that I cannot, I think, have been mistaken. There was, usually, a good light, when the first ministrations began, and even after it had grown dark I could almost always see the outline of the bird’s head and beak, defined against the sky, as it sat perched upon the bare, thin point of an elder-stump, from which it generally flew to feed the chicks. Never was this outline broken by any projection, as it must have been had an insect of any size been held in the bill. A more conclusive argument is, I think, that the chicks were generally fed, in the way I have described, several times in succession. They would always come out from under their mother, as the evening approached, and, jumping up at her bill, try to insist on her feeding them. Whether she ever fed them, then, before leaving the nest, I cannot, for certain, say. I do not think she did, nor can I see how she could have had anything in her crop after sitting, fasting, all day. As a rule, at any rate, she first flew off, and fed them only on her return. When she flew, I used to watch her for as long as I could, and would sometimes see her, as well as the other one, circling and twisting about in the air, in pursuit of insects, as it appeared to me. I never saw any insects, however, as I should have done had they been of any size, nor did I ever see anything, on the part of the birds, that looked like a snatch in the air with open bill. But if insects were being caught at all, the bill must, of course, have been opened to some extent, and this shows, I think—for what else could the birds have been doing?—that it is very difficult in the dusk of evening to see it opened, even when it is. For my own part, I have found it difficult—not to say impossible—to see swallows open their beaks, even in broad daylight, when they were obviously hawking for insects. The point is an important one, I think, in considering what kinds of insects the nightjar more habitually feeds on, and how, in general, it procures them—questions which, having been settled, as it seems to me, merely by assertion, are entirely reopened by the fact that the young are fed in the way I have described. For if moths and cockchafers are the bird’s principal food, why should it not bring these to the young, in the ordinary way? But if it swallows huge quantities of insects, so small that it cannot seize them in the bill, but must engulf them, merely, as it flies, as a whale does infusoria, we can then see a reason for its not doing so. How else, but by disgorging it in the form of a pulp, could such food as this be given to the chick? and if to do so became the bird’s habitual practice, it would not be likely to vary it in any instance. Now the green woodpecker feeds largely on ants, and, further on, I will give my reasons for believing that it feeds its young by regurgitation. The little woodpecker, however, I have watched coming, time and time again, to its hole in the tree-trunk, with its bill full of insects of various kinds, and of a respectable size, so that there is no doubt that it gives these to its brood, as does a thrush or a blackbird. What can make a difference, in this respect, between two such closely-allied species, if it be not that the one has taken to eating ants, minute creatures which it has to swallow wholesale, and could not well carry in the bill? When, therefore, we find the parent nightjar regurgitating food into the chick’s mouth, we may suspect that it also swallows large quantities of insects of an equally small, or smaller size. The beak need neither be widely nor continuously opened, for many such to be engulfed as the bird sailed through a strata of them; but even if it were both, we need not wonder at its not often being remarked, in a species which flies and feeds, mostly, by night, when it is both dark, and people are in bed. Still, I find in Seebohm’s “History of British Birds” the following: “The bird has been said to hunt for its food, with its large mouth wide open, but this is certainly an error.” The first part of the sentence impresses me more than the last. Why has the bird its tremendous, bristle-fringed gape? Does it not suggest a whale’s mouth, with the baleen? Other birds catch individual insects as cleverly, without it.
There is another consideration which makes me think that nightjars feed much in this way. They hardly begin to fly about, before 8.30 in the evening, and between 3 and 4, next morning, they have retired for the day. Now I have watched them closely, on many successive evenings in June and July, and, for the life of me, I could never make out what food they were getting, or, indeed, that they were getting any, up to at least 10 o’clock. For much of the time they would be sitting on a bough, or perched on a fir-top, and churring, and, when they flew, it was often straight to the ground, and then back, again, to the same tree. They certainly did not seem to be catching insects when they did this, and their longer flights were not, as a rule, round trees, and often resolved themselves into chasing and sporting with one another. That they occasionally caught moths or cockchafers seems, in itself, likely, but I never had reason to suppose that these were their particular quarry. It seems strange that I should have so rarely seen them catch any large insect—I cannot, indeed, remember an instance; but, on the other hand, they might well have engulfed crowds of small ones, as they flew, without my being able to detect it, and without any special effort to do so. That the air is often full of these—gnats, little flies, &c.—may be conjectured by watching swallows, and also bats. Indeed, one may both see and feel them oneself—in cycling, for instance, when I have often had a small beetle, constructed on the general plan of a devil’s coach-horse, sticking all over me. For all the above reasons, my view is that it is the smaller things of the air which form the staple of the nightjar’s food, and that its huge gape, and, possibly, the bristles on either side of the upper jaw, stand in relation to the enormous numbers of these which it engulfs. The bird, in fact—and this would apply equally to the other members of the family—plays, in my idea, the part of an aerial whale.
I have watched a pair of nightjars through the whole process of hatching out their eggs and bringing up their young, as long as the latter were to be found; for they got away from the nest—if the bare ground may be called one—long before they could fly. It was on the last day of June that the chicks first burst upon me. I had been watching the sitting bird for some time, and had noticed that the feathers just under her chin were quivering, while her beak was held slightly—as slightly as possible—open. I thought she must be churring, but no sound reached my ear, so I concluded she was asleep merely, and dreaming that she was. She sat so still and close that I never imagined she could have ceased incubating. I had seen her eggs, too, as I thought, yesterday; but in this I may have been mistaken. All at once, however, a strange little, flat, fluffy thing ran out from under her breast, and, stretching up, touched its mother’s beak with its own. She did not respond, however, on which the chick ran back, disappointed. As soon as that queer little figure had disappeared, I was all eagerness to see it again, but hour after hour went by, the old bird drowsed and dreamed, and still there was no re-emergence. It seemed as though I had had an hallucination of the senses, all looked so still and unchangeable; but, at last, as the evening began to fall, and churring to be heard round about, out, suddenly, came the little apparition again, accompanied, this time, with an exact duplicate of itself. The two appeared from opposite sides, and, with a simultaneous jump, seized and struggled for the beak of the mother, who again resisted, and then, suddenly, darted off, just as, with “quaw-ee, quaw-ee,” the partner bird flew up. He settled himself beside the chicks, and when they sprang up at him, as they had just before done at the mother, he fed one thoroughly, but not the other, flying off immediately afterwards. The hen soon returned, and fed both the chicks several times, always, as I say, by the regurgitatory process. Between the intervals of feeding them, she kept uttering a little croodling note, expressive of quiet content and affection, whilst the chicks, more rarely, gave vent to a slender pipe. One of them I now[5] saw to be a little larger than the other, and of a lighter colour, and this bird seemed always to be the more greedy. The difference, in all three respects, increased from day to day, till at last, in regard to size, it became quite remarkable. The two parent birds were much alike in this respect, and as the two chicks had been born within a day of each other, it seems odd that there should have been this disparity between them. But so it was.
It appeared to me that, as the big chick was certainly the greedier of the two, so both the parents tried to avoid the undue favouring of it at the expense of the other. If so, however, their efforts were not very effective. It was difficult, indeed, to avoid the eagerness of whichever one first jumped up at them. As they got older, the chicks were left more and more alone in the nest, or, rather, on the spot where they were born. At first, they used to lie there in a wonderfully quiescent way, not moving, sometimes, for hours at a time, but gradually they became more active, and would make little excursions, from which they did not always trouble to return. Thus, by degrees, the old nesting-site became lost, for the parents, though for some time they continued to show an affection for it, settled more and more by the chicks, or, if they did not see them, somewhere near about, and then called them up to them. This they did with the little croodling note which I have spoken of, and which the chicks, on hearing, would answer with a “quirr, quirr,” and run towards it, then stop to listen, and run again, getting, all the while, more and more excited. If the old bird was at any distance, which, as the chicks got older, was more and more frequently the case, there would sometimes be long intervals between these summoning notes—if we assume them to be such—and, during these, the chicks lay still and, generally, close together, as if they were in the nest. When I walked to them, on these occasions, both the parent birds would start up from somewhere in the neighbourhood, and whilst one of them flew excitedly about, the other—which I took to be the hen—used always to spin, in the most extraordinary manner, over the ground, looking more like an insect than a bird, or, at any rate, suggesting, by her movements, those of a bluebottle that has got its wings scorched in the gas, and fallen down on the table. Whilst she was doing this, the chicks would, sometimes, run away, but, quite as often, one or both of them would remain where they were—apparently quite unconcerned—and allow me to take them up. When, at last, the mother followed the example of her mate, and flew off, she showed the same superior degree of anxiety in the air, as she had, before, upon the ground. She would come quite near me, hover about, dart away and then back again, sit on a thistle-tuft, leave it, as though in despair, and, at last, re-alight on the ground, where she kept up a loud, distressed kind of clucking, which, at times, became shriller, rising, as it were, to an agony. The male was a little less moved. Still, he would fly quite near, and often clap his wings above his back. I cannot, now, quite remember whether the male ever began by spinning over the ground, in the same way as the hen, but, if he did, it did not last long, and he soon took to flight.