Among our summer bird visitors is one that few people in Ireland have heard and fewer have seen. Yet in those times when country people knew more about their surroundings, this bird had a part in their knowledge and their folklore, and they knew it well enough to have given it several names, some accurately descriptive, one bordering on defamatory. Its most usual name is Nightjar or Nightchurr, an attempt to describe its strange call. It is a bird of the dusk, like the owl, and indeed one of its old names in England is Fern-owl. Another is Dor-hawk. It is, however, neither owl nor hawk but is kin to the swift. The Irish name is Túirne Lín, meaning Spinning-wheel or Flax-wheel, again a reference to its voice. This little-known and rather mysterious bird is also called Goatsucker, though it has nothing to do with goats, in spite of its Latin name Caprimulgus, its food being moths and other insects of the night.
In 1943, when Irish roads had little tarmac on them and less wheeled traffic, I bought a second-hand Raleigh bicycle for £10. I needed it for my work. Provided I could get an occasional tyre and tube and an inch or two of valve rubber, I was king of the road. Even on my seventy-mile round trip to my parents’ home at weekends, I seldom saw a car or lorry or tractor.
Cycling one summer’s night along a level road that I knew well, through an area of marshy fields with tussocks of rushes, royal fern and dwarf willows, I heard a sound I had never heard before but that I recognized at once. If I had turned my bicycle upside down on the handlebars and saddle (which I often had to do because of punctures), then given the front wheel a brisk turn and held a twig against the spokes, the sound produced would have been reminiscent of the sound I heard from the marshland, a continuous whirring that suggested a mechanical rather than a natural origin.
Leaving my bicycle against a gate, I climbed over and began to make my way towards the sound. I had been cycling for nearly half an hour and my eyes had become accustomed to the darkness, and though there was neither moon nor stars I could find my way without too much difficulty. I went slowly and as quietly as I could, avoiding clumps, pools and bushes. Knowing that the Nightjar may sing in flight I sometimes scanned the sky but without seeing any bird. The voice in any case seemed to come always from the same spot and I went in that general direction. My progress was steady if slow. Once I looked back but could not see gate or bicycle or road.
I stopped to consider: should I continue right up to him, startle him into flight and hope that he would be clearly visible against the sky, or proceed even more stealthily and pause at a distance of two or three yards when I might see him where he crouched and sang? Either way I now began to realize my chance of a clear sighting of my quarry was small enough. Undecided, I lifted my right foot to take another step, when, as though on that signal, the churring stopped.
There followed a blank, baffling silence, unbroken by a bird’s cry, by a moth’s flutter, by a beetle’s hum. The night was empty. No wing or throat to guide my further progress, and without his voice, I could no longer determine with any clarity where he had been. I had lost him – or more accurately, he had lost me. To be as close as that, and my chance was gone of meeting that elusive hunter of the night sky, that nocturnal mocker. I was standing on one leg in a boggy field, while he watched and no doubt laughed up his sleeve.
I turned back disconsolately, for the first time aware that one foot was wringing wet from stepping in a bog-pool. Now that that insistent whirring had ceased I began to hear the other noises. We tend to think of the night as a time of quiet and stillness, a time of sleep. But the night has its own life. A faint breeze moved the grass. A beetle blundered into my face, startling me. From the hill a fox barked, and when I stopped and listened, there were rustling sounds made by small night-creatures. The air was full of voices.
Having found my way to where I had left my bicycle, I climbed to the top of the gate and turned to look back, when right on cue, that mocking song began once more. He was laughing at me, chuckling in that strange purring voice made of moth, cobweb, twilight, under every bush, under no bush, out there somewhere in his familiar friendly darkness.