A riverside path leads from the outskirts of Beddgelert to Llyn Dinas. I often walked this way years ago after days out on the Eifionydd hills, calling at a Beddgelert pub on the way back to my then home, a caravan near the end of the lake. What I remember best about those walks in dimity light by the swift green flow of Afon Glaslyn was the nightjars’ churring from Rhododendron ponticum thickets around Sygun Fawr. It both puzzled and pleased me, especially when – as often happened – in pursuit of its food along the riverbank one of these mistle-thrush-sized, exquisitely camouflaged birds brushed softly past, “more like a great grey mottled and marbled moth than a bird” , as WH Hudson put it.
The dense rhododendron slopes are atypical as habitat for the nightjar (Caprimulgus europaeus), but Thomas Hardy’s “dewfall-hawk” was there in some numbers, its resonant, penetrating call a sure sign this was a breeding colony. At the time nightjars were a red-list species. They are no longer so. Yet I’ve only once seen them by Sygun in recent years. They’ve gone too from slopes above the hill hamlet in Ariège where I spend some part of each year. In both places, I miss their presence and strange song, referred to by old writers as “reeling, spinning or whirring”.
I remember once coming across a dead Caprimulgus on a shingle bank whilst travelling by dugout canoe up the Rajang River in Sarawak to visit head-hunters’ longhouses on the borders of Kalimantan. “Him frogmouth”, commented my Iban guide – a graphically descriptive name. I felt stiff bristles lining the gape that enclosed his prey. It would have been better for him had it escaped. A huge moth with cartilaginous exoskeleton to wings the size of my hands was jammed in his gullet. I laid him on the shingle, grateful for the glimpse, and thought back to those gentle encounters by the Glaslyn in my home country.
They’re still there, having moved a mile or two into clear-felled areas of Beddgelert forest – a small good thing stemming from environmental degradation. Their new decline is likely down to Maltese gunmen, illegally hunting on the nightjars’ migration route to Africa. Why do “sportsmen” kill for pleasure, destroying thus our kinder enjoyment?
