Roof and Meadow | Page 2

numerous than the swallows are the night-hawks. My roof,
in fact, is the best place I have ever found to study their feeding habits.
These that flit through my smoky dusk may not make city nests, though
the finding of such nests would not surprise me. Of course a
night-hawk's nest, here or anywhere else, would surprise me; for like
her cousin, the whippoorwill, she never builds a nest, but stops in the
grass, the gravel, the leaves, or on a bare rock, deposits her eggs
without even scratching aside the sticks and stones that may share the
bed, and in three days is brooding them--brooding the stones too.
It is likely that some of my hawks nest on the buildings in the
neighborhood. Night-hawks' eggs have occasionally been found among
the pebbles of city roofs. The high, flat house-tops are so quiet and
remote, so far away from the noisy life in the narrow streets below, that
the birds make their nests here as if in a world apart. The twelve-and
fifteen-story buildings are as so many deserted mountain heads to them.
None of the birds build on my roof, however. But from early spring
they haunt the region so constantly that their families, if they have
families at all, must be somewhere in the vicinity. Should I see them
like this about a field or thicket in the country it would certainly mean a
nest.
The sparrows themselves do not seem more at home here than do these
night-hawks. One evening, after a sultry July day, a wild wind-storm
burst over the city. The sun was low, glaring through a narrow rift
between the hill-crests and the clouds that spread green and heavy
across the sky. I could see the lower fringes of the clouds working and
writhing in the wind, but not a sound or a breath was in the air about
me. Around me over my roof flew the night-hawks. They were crying
peevishly and skimming close to the chimneys, not rising, as usual, to
any height.
Suddenly the storm broke. The rain fell as if something had given way
overhead. The wind tore across the stubble of roofs and spires; and
through the wind, the rain, and the rolling clouds shot a weird,
yellow-green sunlight.

I had never seen a storm like it. Nor had the night-hawks. They seemed
to be terrified, and left the sky immediately. One of them, alighting on
the roof across the street, and creeping into the lee of a chimney,
huddled there in sight of me until the wind was spent and a natural
sunlight flooded the world of roofs and domes and spires.
Then they were all awing once more, hawking for supper. Along with
the hawking they got in a great deal of play, doing their tumbling and
cloud-coasting over the roofs just as they do above the fields.
Mounting by easy stages of half a dozen rapid strokes, catching flies by
the way, and crying _peent-peent_, the acrobat climbs until I look a
mere lump on the roof; then ceasing his whimpering peent, he turns on
bowed wings and falls--shoots roofward with fearful speed. The
chimneys! Quick!
Quick he is. Just short of the roofs the taut wings flash a reverse, there
is a lightning swoop, a startling hollow wind-sound, and the rushing
bird is beating skyward again, hawking deliberately as before, and
uttering again his peevish nasal cry.
This single note, the only call he has besides a few squeaks, is far from
a song; farther still is the empty-barrel-bung-hole sound made by the
air in the rushing wings as the bird swoops in his fall. The night-hawk,
alias "bull-bat," does not sing. What a name bull-bat would be for a
singing bird! But a "voice" was never intended for the creature. Voice,
beak, legs, head--everything but wings and maw was sacrificed for a
mouth. What a mouth! The bird can almost swallow himself. Such a
cleft in the head could never mean a song; it could never be utilized for
anything but a fly-trap.
We have use for fly-traps. We need some birds just to sit around, look
pretty, and warble. We will pay them for it in cherries or in whatever
they ask. But there is also a great need for birds that kill insects. And
first among these are the night-hawks. They seem to have been
designed for this sole purpose. Their end is to kill insects. They are
more like machines than any other birds I know. The enormous mouth
feeds an enormous stomach, and this, like a fire-box, makes the power

that works the enormous wings. From a single maw have been taken
eighteen hundred winged ants, to say nothing of the smaller fry that
could not be identified and counted.
But if