Witness to a nocturnal flight of fancy

A FRIEND recently saw a nightjar in Timoleague in west Cork, a sighting worth reporting.

Nightjars are extremely rare in Ireland and very few breed here now. About the size of a mistle thrush, but long-winged and hawk-shaped, they are migrants from Africa, spending spring and summer with us. Their numbers have been in decline for decades.

My wife says when she was young, she would see them following the cows as they returned to the fields in the dusk after milking, hawking white moths rising from the grass. Dylan Thomas, recalling his childhood in the poem Fern Hill, wrote ” ... all the night long I heard, blessed among stables, the nightjars flying with the ricks”. As the name implies, they are nocturnal. Leaving their daytime roost at twilight, they take silently to the air on long, soft-feathered wings.

It was 10.15pm on Jun 1, when my friend, an experienced birder, saw the nightjar glide across the River Argideen and rise soundlessly over the low hill behind him. When roosting, nightjars make a prolonged, churring sound, rhythmical and rising and falling in pitch. Only when courting do they make noises in flight, a loud clapping of the wings, reportedly like a whip-crack.

On Jun 6, my pal saw the bird again. It flew low over the river and then rose and almost flew into his face. He clearly saw its pale wing bars, confirming the species beyond doubt. On Jun 8, he played nightjar calls on his mobile phone and at 10pm it again crossed the river toward him. Some nights later, when the bird didn’t appear, he waved white handkerchiefs in each hand, this being, apparently, a way of attracting nightjars. The long-eared owl regularly seen by sea-trout anglers at Inchy Bridge flew overhead, but no nightjar. He hasn’t seen it since.

During daylight hours, nightjars roost on a tree or on the ground. Their markings render them all but invisible, as unnoticeable as dead leaves or lichen-covered branches. Sir Henry Newbolt, in a poem, described their plumage as “powdered here and there with tiny golden clouds, And wave-line markings like sea-ripples on the sand”.

As the sun ‘travels’ during the day, the bird turns on its roost, thus to throw no shadow. In olden times, countrymen would creep up on it as it slept and club it, later to put it in the pot. There cannot be much meat on a bird that lives on moths.

When Gilbert White wrote The Natural History of Selborne in 1789, nightjars were known as ‘goatsuckers’. He had great affection for them and defended them against the charge of milking goats. Another old name was ‘The Jenny-spinner’. The Irish name, Tuirne Lín, sounds to me onomatopoeic, derived from it spinning-wheel churring.

My nephew regularly sees nightjars resting on the ground beneath a streetlight near his home outside Seville in Spain. I can give interested birders the map coordinates if required.

Despite this year’s appalling weather, outdoor surprises still abound. The other afternoon — one of those rare sunny days and very warm — I saw a puff of smoke rise from amongst the tall grasses on a field boundary, untouched for centuries, across our stream. A small cloud drifted away, carried on the breeze.

The grasses, drying in the heat and programmed for aeons to act when the moment was right, had released their pollen to the wind. All the elements were congruent. This tri-part marriage of pollen, heat and breeze has been consummated for millennia, and thus these lovely wayside grasses, amongst them creeping bent and bristle bent, foxtails and Yorkshire fog, still survive.

For anyone who, like myself, is still in a learning mode, the old grass varieties to be found on road verges and in field corners are well worth a look. They are diverse and beautiful. Unlike the shiny blue silage grass, they do not rely on man to fertilise them, and they put out pollen and seeds.

For those on seaside holidays who are slow, in this unseasonable June, to bathe in the sea, time can pleasantly be spent exploring the plants that grow behind the beach, small, humble bastions against erosion. Adapted to grow in sand and salt air, they provide an unfamiliar micro-world, a diversion to fill the hours while hardy children splash in the sea.