When a heathland common and its secretive summer resident combine, magic results, writes Daniel Williams.
How much are we shaped by the landscapes that surround us? To greater or lesser degrees, we are free to choose where we live, but after a time, once the choice is made, it can come to feel like the landscape has chosen us, that we are in thrall to its pull as the place we call home. It is difficult to break free, even if we might want to. A way of life flows from the landscape and we root ourselves into it, as a tree does.
For two decades now I’ve lived not far from Ludshott Common in Hampshire. Over the years, I guess I’ve come to know its 700 acres of 5,000-year-old open heathland as well as anyone might. I’ve cycled, walked, run and raced competitively around it; played family games of hide and seek and sledged there; used it as a bolthole after unforgiving days at work; explored its most infrequently trodden paths; and had encounters with silver-studded blues, slow worms, Dartford warblers and woodlarks. One of the loops of the common I regularly follow has as its culmination a view to Butser Hill and the ridge of the South Downs stretching out each side of it, fifteen to twenty miles away. At this distance, just as you find closer to, Butser is a green sleeping giant, taking a millennia-long rest in the landscape.
During the pandemic, the sense I’ve always had of the common being a lifeline was only intensified, and there of course, I was not alone. For a time, the fringe of road noise on the eastern side of the common receded, and in the skies above the clumps of silver birch and Scots pine, you were more likely to see red kites than vapour trails.
Although their timings may be shifting, I know how the seasons unfold across the common; when to listen out for the first cuckoo and at what moment the bracken will unfurl its ferns and go into battle for dominion with the seemingly ever-flowering gorse. When that gorse will be spider-webbed or the heather purpling, and where to find vivid red and spotted white autumn alleyways of fly agaric, among other mushrooms. And – rewinding to when the days are longest – where to look for the common’s most exceptional summer visitor, the nightjar.
Likely owing to its crepuscular and nocturnal activity as well as its camouflage colouring, the apparently secretive and devilish nightjar has picked up both mythology and many alternate names. Its scientific designation Caprimulgus reflects the myth that nightjars suckled on goats’ udders. As well as the common goatsucker, they have been called wheeler, churn owl or nightchurr after their song; fern owl after their habitat; and moth hawk or bugeater as a result of their diet. In his poem ‘Afterwards’, Thomas Hardy, who had an eye for such mysteries, named them the dewfall hawk.
Collective nouns for birds also owe their origins to myth and folk tales, but otherwise to wit and lateral thinking. Some other poet somewhere came up with an invisibility of nightjars. That’s perfect for a bird which spends its days blending with the heathland habitat it prefers, emerging only after sunset on summer days to take to the skies and feed on flying insects (which is what they would have found in abundance near livestock like goats; as so often, the myth contains a partial truth). Once the birds of the day put away their song, the nightjars strike up with theirs, a distinctive churring of up to 1,900 notes a minute, which seems to draw near and fade as they modulate the trill and swivel their ground-nesting heads.
At nine o’clock one night in early June, I gather together with ten other locals for a guided walk in search for Ludshott’s nightjars. I’ve been on a such a walk once before, but that was a wild and windy night and little was flying beyond the white handkerchiefs the guide waved to encourage curious females out from their ground cover (on the basis that the males have white wing bars).
This year we meet at the end of a day of rain, the skies finally clearing. Matt Bramich is our host, the head ranger for the common and others nearby, which is looked after by the National Trust. With 25 years’ experience, he is both a fount of information about the work of conserving heathland like Ludshott, and a man who has held a nightjar in his hands. Matt tells us that (according to a survey commissioned by the South Downs National Park and undertaken by Keith Wills) nightjar numbers are stable – 20 were recorded on Ludshott in 2020, and 18 in 2024. The RSPB estimate that around 4,600 nightjars spend their summers in the UK before overwintering in central or eastern Africa. While the average lifespan of a nightjar is four years, through ringing we know that some live as long as a dozen. And they keep on returning to the same unremarkable patches of ground among the heather and gorse at Ludshott, blending with it through their cryptic patterning. Nevertheless, it seems a precarious place to nest, for there are predators at large – stoats, weasels and grass snakes, while hedgehogs will take the nightjar’s eggs.
As we walk out onto the common, a false alarm: a bird too regular in its flapping to be a nightjar – it’s the long tapering bill and bulk of a woodcock. But at our first stop, we’re in luck. We immediately hear churring, and then, much to everyone’s delight, and as if checking out this herd of humans to see if we might have brought with us clouds of insects, the mythic bird appears, performs a rising and falling circuit over our heads, before moving on.
But on this particular walk, that’s as good as it gets. A little more in the way of churring, yet very little in the way of flight, with the air still cool and moist, encouraging neither insects nor their nocturnal predators into the air. Instead, I learn more about how Matt tends to the common on a tight budget. The approach is to replicate the activities of the commoners of the past, who used heathland as marginal farmland, so maintaining a habitat in which rare and endangered species – like the amber-listed nightjar – can thrive.
In truth, I prefer to go in search of nightjars on my own. Armed with knowledge of where to find them, over the years I’ve undertaken solo missions as the sun sets on the longest days of the year. And so a week after the guided walk, on a dry evening after a hot day, I’m out on the common again. Sure enough, fifteen minutes after sunset, the churring begins, and soon I’m seeing nightjar after nightjar silhouetted against the twilight, gliding and flapping, twisting and turning, bobbing and swooping. My amateur reckoning is that Matt’s work is paying dividends: the numbers definitely seem up on last year. As in the hot summer of 2022, there are so many that often the churring becomes a chorus, rather like the stridulation of cicadas in its hypnotic, transporting effect.
Tonight – somewhat unfortunately for my attempts to record their song – the nightjars are accompanied by a covers band playing an open-air set in a nearby village; Valerie and Ruby float across the common. I find a declivity shielded by a stand of Scots pine and achieve cleaner recordings there. Frequently I am circled by this bird of many names, and at one point by a pair of them, fern owl and moth hawk. Then a nightchurr wing-claps along the channel of the path, wheeling low over my head between the avenue created by gorse and silver birch, before disappearing back into the cover of the scrub.
In my estimation, all birds have at the very least a little bit of magic about them, from the robin befriending gardeners to starlings performing the complex mathematical equations of their murmurations. But the nightjars of Ludshott are among the most enchanting, and for as long as they return to the landscape we both call home, I’ll be back to listen to the sorcery of their incantations and bear witness to the spells woven by their flight.
Photograph of nesting nightjar at Farnham Heath by RSPB warden, Mark Crisp
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Find recordings of a nightjar in flight and nightjar churring and wing-clapping via Daniel’s YouTube Channel.
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