We found the nightjar on the edge of a young conifer plantation, just before 10pm. The weather rumbled ominously in the background as dusk settled around us, the trees soughing and shushing in the breeze. Willow warblers carolled in the canopy and a fat woodcock roded over.
Luke lit a cigarette, I slapped at midges. We saw the nightjar before we heard him (which is unusual). Just enough light to see white wing patches, plumage like wave ripples on sand. He flew over, tentative, circling, standing on the handle of his tail and clapping his wings a few times, before arrowing off into the trees.
Bedgebury’s 2,600 acres of rolling woodland, which includes the 320-acre National Pinetum, is one of the best spots for nightjars in the south-east, and Luke Wallace of the Woodland Trust and I were there for the annual nightjar survey. Caprimulgus europaeus is a bird with a mystical aura. Partly for its crepuscular habits and sphinx-like appearance, but mostly for its song.
William Wordsworth described its bubbling call as like “the spirit of a toil-worn slave, / Lashed out of life, not quiet in the grave”, nodding to its nickname whip-poor-will (an American relative of our nightjar is still called by that name). He might also have been thinking of the legend that unbaptised children were turned into nightjars when they died. The song is that wraithlike, that hackle-raising.
Our nightjar began to sing deep within the conifer thicket. We moved closer, stepping into the embrace of medicine-scented branches. As if wanting us to appreciate more fully the weird loveliness of its song, the nightjar flew towards us and settled on a branch above, letting forth a volley of ghostly churrs. For five or six minutes we lived nowhere but inside that eerie stream of sound.
Back in my car I put on Joanna Newsom’s Divers, in which the nightjar is a kind of fluttering familiar. I rolled down the windows. Rain came, and thunder, and even over it and the music, I could still hear the nightjar calling, somewhere in the dense and ancient forest.
As Kingfishers Catch Fire: Birds and Books by Alex Preston and Neil Gower (Little, Brown, £25) is published on 13 July. To order a copy for £21.25 go to bookshop.theguardian.com or call 0330 333 6846.
