In the middle of May the Fern Owl or Nightjar arrives in Great Britain, and utters his jarring or churring spinning-wheel song over the sloping ground of many a common, where the golden gorse blossoms give out their delicious, apricot-like scent, hanging over rifts in the sandstone; and the ground below is studded with patches of ling, below which again luxuriant green ferns, having their roots in the cool moist bottoms, raise their tall fronds. It is warm on the bare patches of stony, sandy soil, on which the sun has been shining all the afternoon, and moths with other winged insects are here in numbers. The Fern Owls know that, and they are churring and squeaking over the slopes and tumbling and darting about after their winged prey, flying quite near to you as you rest on a bit of their hunting ground. On a bare spot on the sunny slope, where a few gorse needles and bits of dead bracken lie, two oblong creamy white eggs will be laid later, marbled and veined in such tones as match their surroundings of stones, dead leaves and bits of brown fern-stalk, so closely that it is by a rare chance that the eye distinguishes them. And when the little creatures are hatched out, they will look, at first, just like a bit of lichen covered stone and a dead leaf. The mother will, it is said, pick her eggs up and place them elsewhere if an intruder has approached them too closely. When the young birds begin to flutter with their wings, the parent bird shifts them up by easy stages, through the low growth of heather and ferns, hustling them on, and bearing them up, until they reach the lowest branches of some dipping oak bough, where they sit in a line with the branch they rest on, invisible to the ordinary observer; and there they are fed with scarcely a pause in the flight of the industrious parent. In Devonshire they feed much on “fern-web”--namely, small chafers. It is a curious thing that the unjust appellation of “goat sucker,” given from time immemorial to this bird, has its equivalent in almost every country of Europe. It is like the case of the barn-owl, which is called “oil drinker” in the south of France. Night-feeding birds have always been the objects of ignorant persecution. The Nightjar is called tette chèvre in France and Geissmelker in Germany. Crapaud-volant is another of its names, after the toad, which is also said to suck goat’s milk.