The sun sinks peach through a faded, pastel blue sky. Either
side of the road wheat fields gently glow, poppies burn red in the verge and
the green oak leaves are gilt-edged. The sun is finally making itself felt,
four days after the solstice. This means Nightjars, at last. For a nocturnal
bird its curious how inextricable they are from the sun: a warm dry night is
what they require, following a long hot day to create the swarms of insects
which they devour. You get roughly an hour as the sun drops to pick them up;
when it’s dark enough to coax them out, yet light enough to see them. They feel
like a fleeting presence in the forest, here one month and gone the next, like
cuckoos, yet curiously they’re one of the longest staying migrants. They’ll
churr in this forest until early September. Curious just about sums the bird
up, but we have no such luck trying to summarise their song, the ‘churr’. If it
sounds like anything at all it sounds like a melodic white noise.
The car pulled up in the forest just as the sun dropped to
the tree tops, casting the conifers in black and gold. As we got out it was
chillier than expected. The sun had lied. It was a bad omen. Omen is a
portentous, creepy word. It suits the otherworldly Nightjar perfectly.
Goatsuckers as shepherd’s used to call them, for the belief that they used to
suck their goats dry at night. Thomas Hardy, poet of the pastoral despair,
called them Dewfall Hawks. Hawks of the dewfall has a certain poetry to it. The
track into the forest was appropriately damp under foot, the long grass
harbouring countless slugs of several species, while a Chiffchaff called the
dusk in from the conifers. A Yellowhammer sung, perched up beside the path, its
beak full of insects: food for its chicks. Slightly further away a Tree Pipit
ran through a few notes of its freewheeling song perched on top of a tree trunk
denuded of branches in the middle of the clear fell. Patterns of forestry have
created an amphitheatre for creatures of the night: a ring of old growth pines
around a weed strewn clear fell, with patches of bare sandy soil. A curlew flew
to the tree stump to roost for the night as the orange evaporated from the sky.
A flew wing claps from somewhere over the wood and the thrumming song of the
Nightjar filled the air. And a glimpse of (I guess) a Noctule bat, jerkily
flying over the clearfell momentarily raised pulses. It came low overhead,
squeaking, its long flappy wings creaking. It makes an impression to see a bat
so large its very act of flying makes noises. I was glad too, I suppose, that
my much-punished ears can still pick out their high frequency squeaking.
In the end five of these creatures did dizzying flights
overhead: at times seemingly the size of the Nightjars, and yet, unfortunately
the Nightjar remained hidden, despite churring from all the corners of the
clearfell. I guess that the unexpectedly cold night kept the insects close to
the trees, and the Nightjars flush to them. It’s impossible at gone ten at
night to see dark birds against black trees; it’s hard enough to pick out the
bats as they flit against the rapidly darkening sky. A failure then, if you
look at it that way. In the context of 2012 it’s just another brick in the wall
of disappointment, a continuation of current form. I’ve yet to see a decent amount
of dragonflies, damselflies, butterflies, any flies at all. Normally the
journey back through the winding roads of west Suffolk after Nightjars results
in the mass slaughter of chunky insects, for whom the light at the end is a
Ford Mondeo’s headlights*. The knock-on effect of this is in the dearth of insectivorous
birds I’ve seen this year: single figure amounts of even the commonest warbler
species. I can’t offer reasons why. I reckon, hope, the fault is with me and
that the birds are still there and going unseen. If not, maybe it’s a blip, a
statistical curiosity, a knock-on effect of from a succession of weird winters.
Other options seem too bleak to contemplate.
*if insects had the cognitive ability to be disappointed by
this fact, they would.
