“But does it really swallow big beetles and June-bugs alive?” Emile asked.
“You can readily understand that in its headlong chase the bird has no time to dismember its captives. Pouncing upon the insect with wide-open beak, snapping it up, and gulping it down—all this it does as it flies, without a moment’s pause. No sooner is the plumpest prey captured than down it goes, alive and struggling, into the bird’s crop.”
“A dozen of that sort of game must stir up a big rumpus in the bird’s crop,” was Emile’s opinion.
“Almost any other creature in the night-jar’s place would have its digestion ruined by a brisk company of coleopters kicking about in the stomach and tickling its walls with their rough and prickly legs; but I am inclined to believe the bird has the means of quieting them immediately by smothering them with its digestive juices. As it carries on the business of stuffing its crop with large live beetles, it ought to know the secret of how to prevent their making a hole in its stomach. But that does not lessen my admiration for its digestive powers. No [[238]]creature enjoys a more remarkable immunity from dyspepsia.
“On a near view the night-jar is not a pretty bird. Its flat skull; its tremendously yawning beak, which seems to split the whole head in two; its wide-open gullet, red and slimy and powdered with the remains of moths recently devoured; its large and prominent eyes—all these give it somewhat the appearance of a toad. That is why it is sometimes called the flying toad. Another common name for it is goat-sucker, based on a false belief as to one of its habits. It likes to visit pastures and sheepfolds, where it chases the beetles to be found there. Noting its frequent appearance among the sheep and goats, shepherds imagined it came there to suck their milk. If they had watched it more closely they would have seen the absurdity of any such notion. A bird suck? What nonsense! But the more ridiculous an idea is, the more likely it is to spread, and the absurd name of goat-sucker is better known in many places than the appropriate and expressive one of night-jar.
“This bird comes to us from warmer lands toward the beginning of May, and leaves us in September. It builds no nest, imitating in this various nocturnal birds of prey. Some hole in the ground or among broken stones, at the foot of a tree or a rock, and usually taken just as it happens to be, suffices to hold the bird’s eggs, which are two or three in number, white with tawny and bluish spots.
“In closing let me beg you to remember what we owe these big-throated birds that hunt insects on the [[239]]wing, and more especially the swifts and swallows, who defend our granaries and gardens, our wardrobes and our very persons. What would you think of any one who, possessing the terrible secret of creating by the bushel moths, gnats, mosquitoes, weevils, and other destructive insects, should let loose a swarm of these creatures in the air about us?”
“I should say hanging was too good for him,” answered Louis.
“But that is exactly what any one does who kills a swallow. It is true he does not create moths and mosquitoes and other insects, but he saves the lives of those that the swallow would have eaten, and thus he is guilty of as grave an offense as if he had created them on purpose to turn them loose on us. He does a wicked deed, for he receives with deadly shotgun the pretty, joyous creature, messenger of spring and sunshine, that comes trustfully asking his hospitality and the permission to build its nest under the eaves of his house. He causes famine, for he encourages the multiplication of those devouring hordes that levy every year on our farm products a tax that amounts to thousands of millions of francs in its total sum and is constantly increasing as insect-eating birds decrease. A wicked deed, I say, a deed which causes famine—that is what is really done by the murderer of swallows.” [[240]]