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Numbers of caterpillars mounted the stalks of grass, and many dragonflies and butterflies appeared, though this was winter. The caprimulgus or goat-sucker, swifts, and different kinds of swallows, with a fiery-red bee-eater in flocks, showed that the lowest temperature here does not destroy the insects on which they feed.
The vultures, like the goat-sucker and woodpecker, seem to be in disgrace with man. They are generally termed a voracious, stinking, cruel and ignoble tribe. Under these impressions the fowler discharges his gun at them, and probably thinks he has done well in ridding the earth of such vermin. Some Governments impose a fine on him who kills a vulture.
No sound or song from any of the winged inhabitants of the forest, not even the clearly pronounced "Whip-poor-will" from the goat-sucker, cause such astonishment as the toll of the campanero.
The frogs were spawning in the pools; primroses were out by scores, and monthly roses blooming still; and Master shot a goat-sucker on the last day in November. All this puzzled the sheep, I suppose, and gave them a notion that their time, too, was at hand. At any rate the lambs fell early; and when they fell, it had turned to perishing cold.
However, when a fever does come, and his incantations are of no avail, which I imagine is most commonly the case, they abandon the place for ever and make a new settlement elsewhere. They consider the owl and the goat-sucker as familiars of the evil spirit, and never destroy them.
Its eyes are too delicately formed to bear the light, and thus it is forced to shun the flaming face of day and wait in patience till night invites him to partake of the pleasures her dusky presence brings. The harmless, unoffending goat-sucker, from the time of Aristotle down to the present day, has been in disgrace with man.
Salad oil is the remedy relied on, and seldom known to fail. The effect of anger on the common snake is marked. The skin, if the creature is annoyed, becomes bristly and colder; sometimes there is a strong snake-like smell emitted. It is singular that the goat-sucker, or fern owl, often stuffed when shot and preserved in glass cases, does not keep; the bird looks draggled and falling to pieces.
The Indians assured us that the Guacharo does not pursue either the lamellicorn insects, or those phalaenae which serve as food to the goat-suckers. It is sufficient to compare the beaks of the Guacharo and goat-sucker to conjecture how much their manners must differ.
As soon as he had said this, very far over the tall hills, which Indians call the Backbone of the Great Spirit, the people saw two great lights, brighter and larger than stars, moving very fast towards the land of the Shawanos. One was just as high as another, and they were both as high as the goat-sucker flies before a thunderstorm.
Four other species of the goat-sucker articulate some words so distinctly that they have received their names from the sentences they utter, and absolutely bewilder the stranger on his arrival in these parts. The most common one sits down close by your door, and flies and alights three or four yards before you, as you walk along the road, crying, "Who-are-you, who-who-who-are-you."
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