THE NIGHT-CROW:
Willughby thought that the so-called “night-raven” was the bittern. Speaking of the curious noise produced by the latter bird, he says:—“This, I suppose, is the
bird which the vulgar call the night-raven, and have a great dread of.”[63]
The bittern was one of the very few birds which Goldsmith, in his “Animated Nature,” described from personal observation, and he, too, calls it the “night-raven.” Its hollow boom, he says, caused it to be held in detestation by the vulgar. “I remember, in the place where I was a boy, with what terror the bird’s note affected the whole village; they considered it as the presage of some sad event, and generally found, or made one to succeed it. If any person in the neighbourhood died, they supposed it could not be otherwise, for the night-raven had foretold it; but if nobody happened to die, the death of a cow or a sheep gave completion to the prophecy.”
Sometimes it was called the night-crow—
“The night-crow cried, aboding luckless time.”
Henry VI. Part III. Act v. Sc. 6.
ITS SUPPOSED PROPHETIC POWER.
Shakespeare has introduced an allusion to the raven with much effect, in the fifth scene of the first act in Macbeth, where an attendant enters the chamber of Lady Macbeth to announce—
“The king comes here to-night.