Also referred to as the nighthawk, it is a small bird with huge eyes, a wide, flat beak and grey/brown mottled and barred plumage. The nightjar is mostly nocturnal and so is rarely seen, though it is often heard. Its silent flight is light and buoyant with many twists and turns. Its song is long and churring, and rises and falls in pitch.
Given its nocturnal activities and its silent, ghostlike, twisting flight, it is perhaps not surprising that the nightjar has attracted a considerable body of adverse folklore. Man, being primarily a creature adapted to a daylight existence, has always had an instinctive and deep-rooted fear of night creatures, and it is no doubt this fear that ultimately lies behind the stories equating the nightjar and its call with witchcraft and death.
As the bird is so well camouflaged, it often reveals itself only by its strange, almost disembodied song. This low churring rising and falling sometimes ceases suddenly, while at other times it appears to run down like a clockwork toy. Early observers likened the song to the sound of a whirring spinning wheel; hence such popular names for the bird as ‘spinner’ or ‘wheelbird’.
One of the commonest myths about the nightjar was that it sucked the milk from cows and goats. First reported by Aristotle, this belief subsequently spread right across Europe, resulting in such names for the bird as the German Ziegenmelker, the Spanish chotacabras gris (grey goat-feeder) and the Russian Kozodoi, which all translate as goat-milker or feeder. In fact, nightjars do indeed often come close to cattle, but this is because they feed on the insects that cattle attract. Presumably, farmers and cowherds misinterpreted what they saw, and assumed that the birds were taking milk from their stock. They must have thought this all the more if the animal had not been milked for some time and its teats were leaking.
Nightjars were quite common in the parish of Selborne in Hampshire, where the pioneering ornithologist Gilbert White (1720–93) was curate. He noted a widely held superstition that they could do great harm to calves by striking at them with their beaks and infecting the animals with a disease known locally as ‘puckeridge’, and wrote in his journal how unlikely this was to be true:
The least observation and attention would convince men that these birds neither injure the goat-herd, nor the grazier; but that they are perfectly harmless, and subsist alone, being night birds, on night-insects … nor does it anywise appear how they can, weak and unarmed as they seem, inflict any harm on kine [cattle], unless they possess the powers of animal magnetism, and can affect them by fluttering over them.
Gilbert White was right: the nightjar’s beak is far too weak to penetrate the hide of a cow; and in reality the infection is caused by the warble fly – Hypoderma bovis – which lays its eggs beneath the skin on the animal’s back. When the eggs hatch, the maggots burrow their way out through the hide, leaving the infection behind. The belief, however, was unshakeable, and so persistent that many country people called the nightjar bird itself a ‘puckeridge’.
As if this unwholesome reputation wasn’t bad enough, the people of Nidderdale in Yorkshire believed that the souls of unbaptized children took the form of nightjars, condemned to wander about the world eternally. They called the birds ‘Gabbleratchets’ or ‘corpse hounds’, the former being a variation of ‘Gabriel’s Hounds’, who, it was said, could be heard baying at night. Quite how the churring call of the nightjar could possibly be confused with that of hounds, spectral or otherwise, is something of a mystery. Perhaps local people confused the call of the nightjar with that of an OWL.
In Greek mythology, the nightjar features in the story of Aigypios, a young man who fell in love with his friend’s mother, the widow Timandra. Her son, Neophron, objected to the match, and in his bitterness he contrived to seduce Aigypios’ mother, Boulis. But he didn’t stop there. He eavesdropped on his mother and his friend, finding out when and where they had their romantic liaisons. By arranging with Boulis to meet in the darkened chamber where Timandra and Aigypios normally met, and then distracting his mother, he tricked Boulis and Aigypios into committing incest. When Boulis awoke to discover her son lying by her side, she took a dagger and blinded her son before plunging the blade into her breast. Zeus took pity on the victims of such a cruel stratagem and transformed Aigypios into a lammergeyer (a large Eurasian vulture), Neophron into an Egyptian vulture, Boulis into a seabird and Timandra into a nightjar.