Page:White - The natural history of Selborne, and the naturalist's calendar, 1879.djvu/422

400 perfectly harmless, and subsist alone, being night birds, on night insects, such as scarabæi and phalænæ; and through the month of July mostly on the scarabxus solstitialis, which in many districts abounds at that season. Those that we have opened, have always had their craws stuffed with large night moths and their eggs, and pieces of chaffers: nor does it anywise appear how they can, weak and unarmed as they seem, inflict any harm upon kine, unless they possess the powers of animal magnetism and can affect them by fluttering over them.

A fern-owl, this evening (August 27th) showed off in a very unusual and entertaining manner, by hawking round and round the circumference of my great spreading oak for twenty times following, keeping mostly close to the grass, but occasionally glancing up amidst the boughs of the tree. This amusing bird was then in pursuit of a brood of some particular phalæna belonging to the oak, of which there are several sorts; and exhibited on the occasion a command of wing superior, I think, to that of the swallow itself.

When a person approaches the haunt of fern-owls in an evening, they continue flying round the head of the obtruder; and by striking their wings together above their backs, in the manner that the pigeons called smiters are known to do, make a smart snap; perhaps at that time they are jealous for their young, and their noise and gesture are intended by way of menace.

Fern-owls have attachment to oaks, no doubt on account of food; for the next evening we saw one again several times among the boughs of the same tree but it did not skim round its stem over the grass, as on the evening before. In May these birds find the Scarabæus melolontha on the oak, and the Scarabæus solstitialis at midsummer. These peculiar birds can only be watched and observed for two hours in the twenty-four; and then in dubious twilight an hour after sunset and an hour before sunrise.

On this day (July 14th, 1789), a woman brought me two eggs of a fern-owl or evening jarr, which she found on the verge of the Hanger, to the left of the hermitage under a beechen shrub. This person, who lives just at the foot of the Hanger, seems well acquainted with these nocturnal swallows, and says she has often found their