In the first scene of Shakespeare’s The Tempest, as a savage storm rips apart the nobles’ ship and doom is certain, Gonzalo cries out, ‘Now would I give a thousand furlongs of sea for an acre of barren ground, long heath, brown furze, any thing.’ Even an acre of worthless heath, he says, would be welcome to him now. Likewise, in King Lear, the wild heath and the violent storm that rages over it are a metaphor for the king’s descent into madness and his country’s with him. Our island’s historic disdain for heathland and its inhabitants is even, most likely, encoded in the word heathen, meaning a dweller of wild, open ground and, later, outside establishment-sanctioned beliefs.
Creatures which emerge by night are scarcely more popular in British folklore. In A Midsummer Night’s Dream, Titania calls on her fairies to ‘keep back that clamorous owl that nightly hoots and wonders at our quaint spirits’. Her fairies respond with a lullaby, warding off wicked nocturnal wildlife: ‘Thorny hedgehogs, be not seen’. (Centuries later these superstitions about night wildlife are revisited in The Fast Show, when a crazed scarecrow admonishes a rambler about local dangers: ‘What about owls? Plenty of owls round here. And badgers. What about badgers?’)
Our Living Landscapes, as much as they are about saving rare wildlife and letting it flourish across the countryside, are about people’s stories in nature
Imagine then how British culture would portray a creature that was both nocturnal and a resident of heaths. The nightjar, just such a nighttime heath-dweller, holds an unfortunate place in British superstition; indeed across Europe it has had bad press since the Romans (what have they ever done for us?) dubbed it caprimulgus, the goat-milker, and accused it of draining the animals’ udders. In Britain until well into the twentieth century this superstition pertained in the bird’s colloquial name goatsucker. The nightjar did itself no favours by giving (at night of course, and on a heath) a strange, rattling, mechanical song, quite unlike the melodious voice of any other British bird. In consequence it has long been considered a portent of harm and death. As Gilbert White reports in a letter to Norfolk’s pioneering naturalist Robert Marsham, locals in late eighteenth century Hampshire still quite wrongly believed it the vector of a fatal sickness in calves which was known as puckeridge.
Some facts. Nightjars do not steal milk from goats. They don’t even buy it in cartons. They eat moths and other nocturnal insects, which they catch on the wing over heaths, woodland clearings and young plantations across England and southern Scotland. Nor, as Gilbert White already knew, do they spread death and disease. ‘The least attention and observation would convince men that these poor birds neither injure the goat-heard [sic] nor the grazier; but that they are perfectly harmless, and subsist alone on night-moths and beetles […]’
Despite their wide distribution in the UK, and their prevalence in misguided myth, nightjars are rare, with the British Trust for Ornithology reporting just 4,600 singing males country-wide. They are migrants from Africa which arrive each year from mid-April. Returning males immediately give their strange purring songs, claiming the patches of heath on which they and their mates will breed. Each clutch is of two dark-blotched eggs laid directly onto the peaty soil. Come autumn, as is the case with almost all of our migratory landbirds, the parents will desert those of their young which have made it to adulthood, leaving them alone to follow instinct and the magnetic field of the earth on their maiden migration to sub-saharan Africa.
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NWT Roydon Common, photo by Richard Osbourne
Each spring some hundreds of male nightjars return to Norfolk and begin to sing. Many of these nest in the Brecks, where felled or recently replanted conifer forests suit them ideally. The rest largely inhabit heather heaths, as they did in the times of King Lear, Gilbert White and Robert Marsham. Norfolk’s most extensive heather heath is Roydon Common, in Norfolk Wildlife Trust’s Gaywood Valley Living Landscape, close to King’s Lynn. Year-round its wide sky is full of noise: the stone-tap chack of stonechats, the wild burble of curlews, the plaintive lilting of woodlarks and, of course, in summer, the dusk drilling of the nightjar. On a warm evening walk on Roydon Common in late May you may hear several of these wrongly-accused calf-killers singing from stands of birch. You may hear the quiet quip of a nightjar in flight or the clap of a male’s wings as he displays to his female. You may even see a long-winged shape swoop low over heather and gorse or drop to the sandy track ahead of you.
With the nightjar’s heathland habitat, on Roydon Common and next door on newly-restored Grimston Warren, at the heart of the Gaywood Valley Living Landscape, this fascinating bird has been selected as our 9 for 90 species to represent it.
But heathland is far from the only habitat to be found, under the nightjar’s wings, in the Gaywood Valley. The River Gaywood begins as a chalk stream. Its waters, springing from the underlying Late Cretaceous chalk, are always busy: the neon flash and piercing whistle of a kingfisher, the trundling doggy-paddle of a water vole, the skipping wings in summer of many banded demoiselles. By the river, at Sugar Fen and Derby Fen and Leziate, there are fens, old marshes rich in plants and insects which survive nowhere else. There is old grassland too, in churchyards and neglected corners, where modern fertilisers have not tipped conditions in favour of aggressive grasses and driven out specialist wildflowers. Here there are still bedstraws, vetches, orchids, knapweeds, vetchlings, saxifrages and tares, plus the countless invertebrates which depend on them. On the edge of King’s Lynn there are old woods too, Reffley Wood the first among them. Here, as at Grimston Warren, the wild flora has lain for decades lost under plantations of conifers. Today, with the return of native broadleaves and traditional rhythms of management, the understorey flora – the wild garlic, bluebells, early purple orchids and sanicle of ancient woods – is blooming again.
The Gaywood Valley may be the smallest of our Living Landscapes, but it is remarkable in its diversity of landscape, habitat and wildlife. It is remarkable for its people too. The River Gaywood, having crossed fen, heath and grassland, flows through the lives of thousands of people in urban King’s Lynn.
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Woodlark, photo by Lawrie Webb
In the second decade of the twenty-first century hardly anyone in King’s Lynn or elsewhere in Norfolk keeps goats; hardly anyone has seen a nightjar; and no one believes that nightjars kill calves or filch milch. Yet everyone needs nature near at hand. In an unemotional, biological sense we need clean water, filtered by chalk and flower-rich fens, we need oxygen, impossible without trees and plants, and we need soils capable of producing our food. In a wider sense we need nature because we are its daughters and sons, separated from intimate knowledge of it by just one or two generations. Shakespeare’s heathland metaphors and the strange beliefs about nightjars reported by Gilbert White had meaning because, until very recent British history, heaths, nightjars, woods, owls and badgers were a tangible part of people’s lives, their experience and their stories.
Our Living Landscapes, as much as they are about saving rare wildlife and letting it flourish across the countryside, are about people’s stories in nature. They are about those hairs-on-the-neck moments when a big-eyed bird from Africa judders into strange song on a warm, moth-heavy evening on a heath. They are about personal mythology, of place, of species, and of landscape. They are about our place in nature and its place in us. As a symbol for this there is no better species than the Gaywood’s nocturnal, heath-haunting nightjar.