LEAVES FROM A NATURE NOTEBOOK: A Summer's Night in the Wood

This is an abbreviated extract from my forthcoming book Night Life: Five Walks After Dark, to be published by Doubleday/Penguin Random House in October. It’s a sequel to Nightwalking from the same publishers.

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Under the full fat moon, I returned home via the Ten Acre Wood, because I knew the nightjars would be about. Sure enough, as we entered the tunnel entrance to the wood, I heard their transmissions; they do not sing, as other birds do, but ‘churr’; an unnatural, manufactured, repetitive tool-type sound, as suggested by the archaic common names for this summer migrant bird: ‘scissor grinder’, ‘razor grinder’, ‘spinner’.

The mouth of the nightjar is wide, gaping, openable on two planes, vertical and horizontal, fringed by bill bristles which funnel cruelly the prey into the mouth-trap. Moth-trap. The chalk stone track of the wood is tractor-wide, and arrow-straight for 500 yards through telephone-pole oaks. No bends, an open aspect, free absolutely from the inconvenient obstacles called branches if you are a hunting night bird. In moonshine, the wood track is a moth run, a moth shoot; m a nightjar’s perfect killing ground. From the trees, moths emerged, white and hapless, pathetically fluttery. And a nightjar came whirling in over our heads, performing its own ballet. A danse macabre. A pirouette on the centre of its own spine, then a leap, a swoop, a dead-stop, every wing and tail feather air-braking. The bird’s agility extends to the courtship display, where it flies whirlwind circles while clapping its wings together over its back.