Nightjars in Human Culture
These lines are from the poem Love in the Valley by George Meredith —
- Lone on the fir-branch, his rattle-notes unvaried,
- Brooding o'er the gloom, spins the brown eve-jar.'
In Fern Hill Dylan Thomas wrote :
" and all the night long I heard, blessed among stables, the nightjars flying with the ricks."
The similarity to the whirr of a spinning-wheel doubtless originated the old name "Jenny-spinner". The duration of the trill may be for a fraction of a minute or for several minutes without a pause. It is continued at intervals during summer, and occasionally may be heard in August and September, just before the bird departs.
Its rounded head and short beak, together with its mottled dress, give it a peculiar reptilian appearance; little wonder that one of its old names is "Flying toad." "Nighthawk" and "Fern-owl" are names derived from its habits, "Dorhawk" and "Moth-owl" from its food.
Its weird nocturnal note and silent ghostly flight have earned from the superstitious the name "Lich (corpse) Fowl" and "Puckeridge", and "Goatsucker" is due to wholly erroneous notions of its intentions when flying amongst animals.
Read more about this topic: European Nightjar
Famous quotes containing the words human and/or culture:
“The fact is, that civilisation requires slaves.... Human slavery is wrong, insecure, and demoralising. On mechanical slavery, on the slavery of the machine, the future of the world depends.”
—Oscar Wilde (1854–1900)
“We do not need to minimize the poverty of the ghetto or the suffering inflicted by whites on blacks in order to see that the increasingly dangerous and unpredictable conditions of middle- class life have given rise to similar strategies for survival. Indeed the attraction of black culture for disaffected whites suggests that black culture now speaks to a general condition.”
—Christopher Lasch (b. 1932)