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Updated: June 7, 2025
His thoughts blurred into the gathering shadows of sleep. Of a sudden he was awake, his eyes staring into the dark, his whole body nervously, acutely, on the alert. He had heard a cry of a nightjar but so strange and eerie that it made him hold his breath. The call was repeated. An owl answered with a creepy cry of alarm.
The sunset died away among the blue hill-ranges, and a soft breeze began to stir among the leaves of the sycamore overhead. A nightjar sent out its liquid, reiterated note from the heather, and a star climbed above the edge of the dark hill. Here was peace enough, if he could but reach it and seize it. Yet it softly eluded his grasp, and seemed only to mock him as unattainable.
Directly after a cloud of largish birds, somewhat like the British nightjar in appearance, came swooping by, separating as soon as they were outside, and making for the forest patches across the canon. "Do you know them?" said Briscoe, turning round to Brace. "No: some kind of bird that goes to roost there, I suppose." "Yes; they roost and breed and live there," said Briscoe.
Indeed of the two, the nightjar, with its soft and delicately pencilled plumage and the conspicuous white spots, is perhaps the handsomer, though, as it is seen only in the gloaming, its quiet beauty is but little appreciated.
It is not to be denied that the churring note of the nightjar is, to ordinary ears, the reverse of attractive, and the bird is not much more pleasing to the eye than to the ear; while the nightingale, on the contrary, produces such sweet sounds as made Izaak Walton marvel what music God could provide for His saints in heaven when He gave such as this to sinners on earth.
Among the regular visitors are included the white wagtail, the pied flycatcher, the nightjar, the black redstart, the lesser redpole, the snow bunting, the redwing, the reed, marsh, and grasshopper warblers, the siskin, the dotterel, the sanderling, the wryneck, the hobby, the merlin, the bittern, and the shoveller.
There was little more to be learnt, but I was told that farmers crossing the moors on their way home from Colne market had sometimes heard, among the rocks on the crest of the hills, the sound of a spinning-wheel; but others had laughed at this, and had said that what they had heard was only the cry of the nightjar among the bracken.
Sharp, as four of us walked out one evening after dinner in a somewhat melancholy twilight, the glow-worms here and there trimming their ghostly lamps by the wayside, and the nightjar churring its hoarse lovesong somewhere in the thickening dusk. "Will," Mrs.
How different the nights had seemed when I was without shelter, before I had rediscovered fire! How had I endured it? That strange ghostly gloom of the woods at night-time full of innumerable strange shapes; still and dark, yet with something seen at times moving amidst them, dark and vague and strange also an owl, perhaps, or bat, or great winged moth, or nightjar.
Nicholson, Dr., on the non-immunity of dark Europeans from yellow fever. Nictitating membrane. Nidification of fishes; relation of, to colour; of British birds. Night-heron, cries of the. Nightingale, arrival of the male before the female; object of the song of the. Nightingales, new mates found by. Nightjar, selection of a mate by the female; Australian, sexes of; coloration of the.
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