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.