A real fly by night

Once reviled as a creature of doom, the nightjar is an avian miracle that sits silently motionless by day and flies noiselessly at night. No wonder it is so hard to spot

- Ian Morton

CREATURES of the night made our ancestors nervous. If they couldn’t see them, or only caught fleeting glimpses, they drew alarming conclusions. And if misfortune struck, it was only too easy to blame unfriendly forces at work as men slept, especially among superstitious rural folk. A secretive darkplumaged bird that materialised during the summer attracted particular concern—the nightjar. Ever since ancient times, the bird was reviled as a parasite that lived by suckling milk-laden nanny goats under the cloak of darkness. The animals it attacked would cease to produce milk and might go blind. The notion first spread in the Middle Eastern lands where goats were central to animal farming and the bird’s generic Latin name enshrined its bad reputation Caprimulgus, from capra (a nanny goat) and mulgere (to milk), hence ‘goatsucker’. This unpleasant association was recorded in the writings of Aristotle and Pliny, then later accepted by Linnaeus in 1758 and by Irish zoologist Nicholas Vigors, who classified its family group as Caprimulgidae in 1825. The slander was widely established—in France, it was l’engoulevent, in Italy succiacapre and in the German language Ziegenmelker.