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Updated: June 10, 2025
The fern-owl, or goatsucker, is one of the most harmless of birds a sort of evening swallow living on moths, chafers, and similar night-flying insects. Continuing my walk, still under the oaks and green acorns, I wondered why I did not meet any one.
At twilight I had lingered at the woodside, also in other likely places, and the goatsucker had failed to appear, gliding and zig-zagging hither and thither on his dusky-mottled noiseless wings, and now this still heavier disappointment was mine. I could not find the wryneck. Those quiet grassy orchards, shut in by straggling hedges, should have had him as a favoured summer guest.
When the moon shines bright you may have a fair opportunity of examining the goatsucker. You will see it close by the cows, goats, and sheep, jumping up every now and then under their bellies.
That sounds wonderful as a fairy story come true, does it not? And like the knight in some old fairy tale, could not Ardea's new Soldier "live happily forever after"? There are many accounts of the flying clown, in books, nearly all of which refer to him as bull-bat or nighthawk, and a member of the Goatsucker or Nightjar family.
The prettily-mottled plumage of the goatsucker, like that of the owl, wants the lustre which is observed in the feathers of the birds of day. This at once marks him as a lover of the pale moon’s nightly beams. There are nine species here. The largest appears nearly the size of the English wood-owl. Its cry is so remarkable that, having once heard it, you will never forget it.
By day all through the summer months there was always something to be seen in the lane a squirrel, a stoat; always a song-bird to listen to, a flower or fern to gather. By night the goatsucker visited it, and the bat, and the white owl gliding down the slope.
Four other species of the goatsucker 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.
In some places they call it the `goatsucker, from a foolish idea that it sucked the milk from the goats, as it is sometimes seen to fly close down to them, and, between the legs of various animals, to capture the flies that infest them in the soft, tender parts of their bodies.
In some districts where they are common, it is not unusual to see a goatsucker or fern-owl hawk along close to the eaves in the dusk of the evening for moths. They do sometimes take up their residence in the roofs of outhouses attached to dwellings, but not often nowadays, though still residing in the roofs of old castles. Jackdaws, again, are roof-birds, building in the roofs of towers.
Happily for it, neither the negro nor the Indian who believe it to be a bird of ill-omen will venture to kill it; supposing the bird to be the receptacle for departed souls, come back to earth, unable to rest for crimes done in their days of nature. Ignorance alone has given the goatsucker its name.
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