Lich Fowl

The light is fading and the air is heavy with the smell of conifers as I reach the crossroads in the woods. The two-mile trek from the town has been quiet, with few birds seen or heard. But the Rewell rarely reveals many of its secrets.

Some birds are still singing but they become fewer by the minute. Now all that is left is a Song Thrush hurling defiance at the night and a Robin ticking subversively in the undergrowth. Then for a second or two there is nothing. Still a few minutes before they start, I think, and am immediately proved wrong as a Nightjar starts churring.

20.54 according to my watch, a lot earlier than I’d expected. But it’s a warm night, moths already active. And the Nightjars are recently arrived, keen to eat and mate. Three minutes later one flies beside the path before landing above it, a dark silhouette perched sphinx-like on a thin branch.

This is Caprimulgus europaeus, the goatsucker, though there are no goats here to render sterile. It is also the lich fowl, or lich owl, the corpse bird, though there are no bodies here, or none that I’m aware of. Not a bird of good omen, the lich fowl. It is one of the “unlucky or ill-boding Birds, as the Night Ravens, Screech Owls, etc,” Nathan Bailey wrote in his 1721 Universal Etymological English Dictionary.

The bird stops churring and flies from the branch, leaving the woods silent for a minute or so. I walk further along the path, hearing the same or another Nightjar in the distance. A few seconds later a male Tawny Owl calls as it flits through the trees and is answered by a female.

In the far distance the Song Thrush resumes its complaint as I reach the end of the path and watch the light decaying over the high woods to the west. Retracing my steps a Woodcock rodes high above the path; at 21.15, its appearance is late tonight. Before it disappears two Nightjars hurtle past, then wheel round and back over my head, a male wooing a female in a paroxysm of wing clapping, the white in his wings and tail gleaming incongruously in the half light.

There’s barely time to draw breath before the Woodcock is back, lower now, and as I reach the crossroads another Nightjar starts churring. As I listen to its hypnotic rise and fall a Woodcock winnows past, this one on a different trajectory, a different bird perhaps.

The walk back is in almost complete darkness and passes without sound, bar an occasional fluttering and indignant squeak as my passage disturbs a small bird or mammal. No owls, lich or screech, and no sign of the grumpy badger that haunted the path last year. The wood has closed in on itself again.