And Then Come the Nightjars: Down on the Farm

Bad luck is nightjars. They fly silent.

Michael Vallance

I went to Bali last month for what I thought was going to be a relaxing two-week holiday. But by the end of the trip, I was glad to get back home to have a holiday from my holiday.

The flight to Indonesia was turned around two hours out of Melbourne when a disturbed woman stalked up and down the aisles and threatened anyone who told her to “settle down”. You may have heard about this on the evening news. We had to go through the entire customs de-boarding ritual and were put up in an airport hotel in order to catch the next flight the following morning.

Then, after three days of relative bliss in Bali, ten out of our party of thirteen came down with Bali belly after a night out at a Japanese restaurant. Most members elected to try the latest Bali belly cure: an IV drip of vitamins and hydration fluids, delivered directly to your room (and into your arm), by a mobile doctor-and-nurse team—at $200 a pop. I chose the old-fashioned method of just sweating it out.

Finally, arriving home at Melbourne airport, we were informed that Indonesia was rife with foot-and-mouth disease (FMD) and that we had to declare any footwear in our luggage that might have picked up something from any muddy country roads—which pretty much means all of Bali! We were given a firm and scary lecture over the aircraft intercom about the seriousness of FMD and how it could destroy the livestock industry in Australia.

Upon leaving the plane, we had to state that we hadn’t visited any farms and then drag our feet across a long rubber citric acid disinfectant sanitation mat embedded with small protrusions in order to “clean” the bottoms of our shoes.

It never felt so good to be back in “safe” old Australia.

Two days later, by coincidence, I watched a film, And Then Come the Nightjars (2023), about the 2001 outbreak of FMD in the UK, the first major outbreak of the disease there since 1967. The oddly poetic title of the film refers to a nocturnal bird with long wings and short legs known as a nightjar. There are folk tales in just about every culture in the world about this elusive little creature, viewed as a harbinger of death or messenger of doom.

The movie was adapted for the screen by Bea Roberts from her acclaimed stage play, and both theatre production and film were directed by Paul Robinson in his first foray into movies. It stars David Fielder as Michael, a South Devon dairy farmer, and Nigel Hastings as Jeff, the local veterinarian. Jeff has helped Michael nurse and administer to his herd of cattle for decades. Now the vet is being tasked by the government with destroying any animals within a three-mile radius of any known FMD infection. Even though Michael’s herd has tested healthy and free from disease, it falls within the three-mile radius.

The story is told in five time jumps over the course of about twelve years and is set in the southern Devon village of Ashwalden. It opens in Michael’s barn. Michael is a born-and-bred Dartmoor farmer. Jeff, the vet, an outsider from the Home Counties, is there helping him deliver a calf.

All of Michael’s cows are named after the royal family: Elizabeth, Anne, Diana, Margaret, Zara, and Beatrice. Michael wryly remarks, “We lost Camilla to the bloat in Feb … I’m running out of Royals.”

Michael and Jeff hear the cry of a nightjar, which Michael takes as an omen. He is afraid that the recent outbreak of FMD in the area will infect his herd. Jeff reassures him that his cows have tested negative and that the disease is nowhere near his farm.

The two men continually spar with each other with mutually affectionate name-calling. Jeff is also having difficulty with his wife.

Michael is still concerned: “You’ll be in charge anyway … if it comes down here? You’re the only one I trust with my girls.”

A week later, Jeff arrives at the farm wearing a hazmat suit. There is a sanitation team outside the gate waiting to come in. Michael emerges from the doorway carrying a shotgun. The Ministry for Agriculture, Farm and Fisheries (MAFF) wants to destroy the herd. The closest neighbour to them has had their cows test positive to FMD and the entire herd was shot and burned. Michael’s herd must be destroyed as well, healthy or not. The government will reimburse Michael, but he is not interested in the money.

Jeff explains in detail to Michael how he will dispatch each of his beloved “girls” in order to minimise pain and distress. Michael adds cynically: “And then sling her on a pile and burn her.”

Seven months later, Jeff’s wife has thrown him out and she has taken their daughter to live with her mother. Jeff turns up at Michael’s barn. His head is bloody, as he has just crashed his car while drunk. Michael is still angry with him but, as Jeff is hurt, takes him in. Michael tells him that the MAFF team didn’t clean up his property properly after the cull—leaving the corpses of his burnt cattle in a heap attracting flies and maggots. The rain and relentless sun made them steam and created a horrible stench. The two men talk through the difficult time they had.

Eight years later, Michael and Jeff are at a wedding reception for Jeff’s daughter. They have reconciled and become partners in Michael’s farm. Michael tells him that they’ll double their herd by next year. The local neighbours have been converting their barns into “holiday lets”, for conferences and weddings, and housing estates are beginning to encroach on former farmland. Jeff has invited a developer to come and give them a valuation of Michael’s barn but Michael hates the idea:

What, so we just give everything up to people [who] come here [and] treat this whole county like a f***ing hotel? Like it’s all been put here for their weekend and their postcards. Don’t let ’em come here and bully you. Been walking round here. I heard the lot of ’em: “Oh how lovely. It’s like an old painting,” but it’s not a painting, is it? It’s actually here. It’s proper. Ten years ago they would’ve been ankle deep in cow shit.

Jeff soberly reminds Michael that they are just about out of money.

Two years later, Michael is dying of emphysema. The developer has come up with a name for the renovations to Michael’s barn: “Shepherd’s Dell”. Michael hates it but he tells Jeff that the house is now his to do what he wants.

As the sun sets, the two old friends sit quietly holding hands. They hear the cry of a nightjar.

Playwright and screenwriter Bea Roberts grew up in Dartmoor. And Then Come the Nightjars was first performed at Theatre503 in London in 2015, before moving to the Bristol Old Vic.

David Fielder and Nigel Hastings starred in the roles of Michael and Jeff, respectively, in the stage version and they’ve reprised their roles for the film. Their experience performing these characters night after night in front of live audiences brings a depth and immediacy rarely seen in film today.

In some ways, the medium of film is better suited to portray the rural setting of the story. In an interview with Salvatore Cento of MovieWeb, Hastings said, “The atmosphere of actually being on the farm with real cows, with the farmer actually working around us … it all just felt very real. The change I made was to try and find more of the internal sense of the character and the reality of what they were going through.”

The director, Peter Robinson, told Cento about the humour he found among the locals of Devon that he incorporated into the productions: “However difficult things got, they had each other, they could joke together.”

The movie is remarkably faithful to the playscript. However, in the play, the names of the two main characters are given in full, with suggested age ranges: Michael Vallance (sixty-two to seventy-four) and Jeff Crawford (forty-one to fifty-three). In the movie, and in the final credits, they are only referred to by their first names.

The nightjar. These mysterious birds are members of the Caprimulgidae family, recognised by distinctive whirring calls. In parts of America, they are known as nighthawks. They have always been linked to the supernatural, magic and the world of spirits. Some Native American tribes believed they had the mimicking ability to imitate the voices of the dead—a bad omen if heard. Some of their names include “corpse whistler”, “corpse hound”, “witch bird”, “dor-hawk”, and “ghost caller” under the belief that the souls of unbaptised children would be doomed to wander in the form of a nightjar until Judgment Day. The Mapuche people of Chile and Argentina referred to the nightjars’ human-like vocalisations as “the ones who weep and laugh”. The Germans called them “goatsuckers”, believing they emptied the udders of goats at night and poisoned them so that they went blind. The French called them “flying toads” with the same mystical powers as the toad. The Xhosa people of southern Africa believed nightjars embodied ancestral spirits. Aztec soldiers going to battle interpreted their cries as a portent of impending death. In India, hearing its call near a house foretold death in the family. The species of the Indonesian island of Sulawesi is known as the satanic nightjar (Eurostopodus diabolicus), from the sound of a cry which locals have said sounds like a bird pulling out someone’s eye.

But some cultures have looked kindly on the nightjar. Certain Native American tribes regarded it as a protective entity that deterred evil spirits and prevented nightmares. The San people of Africa considered them sacred for leading shamans to higher realms and bringing healing powers.

Some Australian Aborigines called them moopoke, or mopoke, meaning “heartbreaker”. Ken Macintyre and Barb Dobson, in their paper “Owl Beliefs in Nyungar Culture”, based on information provided by Nyungar elders, said:

It is our contention that owls, tawny frogmouths and other related night birds (such as nightjars and owlet-nightjars) were probably all traditionally categorized into a group or class of bird known as winnaitch referring to night birds, spirits of the night or warra (bad).

Some Aboriginal peoples have also interpreted the nightjars’ cries as representations of different kinds of spirits, both good and evil, even welcoming them as a sign of fertility.

The unusual dual nature of the nightjar is presented in both the beginning of the film, where its cry signifies a bad omen of the horrible things to come, and at the very end, where it represents a sign of hope and renewal.

As usual, with most really interesting films (at least, to me), there have been mixed reviews. Maria Lattila of Whynow wrote, “Hastings and Fielder are both quietly magnetic in their roles. Reprising them from the original play, there’s a wonderful, underrated lived-in quality to how the two men bounce off each other … a perfect Sunday afternoon film … just 80 minutes, it’s breezy and delightful.” Chris Riches of Express remarked, “Films showing the dirt under the fingernails of rural British life are rare, which is maybe why this feels very natural, honest and almost shorn of unnecessary, extraneous characters that could hinder or come between the pair.” Roger Moore of Movie Nation heartily recommended it:

a distinctly British elegy … Nightjars makes for a funereal film with flashes of wit, drama and fire … a lovely film with a sombre, sad undertone, a country life ‘dying of the light’ that makes the journey from stage to screen with its heart still broken, but intact.

Leslie Felperin of the Guardian wasn’t convinced: “the slushy musical score and prettified cinematography—everything seems to happen at magic hour—prove more irritating than enhancing. Even the title’s inelegant plod of monosyllables comes off as somehow annoying and pretentious.”

More than six million animals were euthanased during the 2001 FMD outbreak in the UK. Slaughtermen, often abattoir workers, were supervised by veterinarians, similar to the character of Jeff in the movie. The carcasses were burned and whenever possible buried in mass pits. Moving livestock across the country was banned. There were meat shortages. It took six months to bring the outbreak under control.

The acidic disinfectant mats at Melbourne airport were first installed in 2022 when viral fragments of African swine fever were detected in food products arriving from China. Jordyn Beazley of the Guardian recounted that New South Wales cattle farmer Mick Wettenhall posted a video of a herd of cows grazing 500 metres from the busy Bali tourist neighbourhood of Seminak and said that it was ridiculous to ask passengers arriving in Australia from Bali if they’ve been to a farm. “Our [government] needs to assume if you have been to Bali, you have been to a farm. You don’t have to go to the rural areas to come across livestock.” The opposition leader, Peter Dutton, wanted the borders to Indonesia closed due to the risk of spreading FMD but Dr Mark Schipp, Australia’s Chief Veterinary Officer, and the entire Australian meat industry disagreed and supported keeping the borders open.

Last year, forty tonnes of biosecurity risk material, including turtle meat, frog meat, prawns and pig meat, were seized by quarantine officials at a Sydney warehouse. White spot disease was detected in some of the prawns. Shipp told ABC Rural, “If somebody was to discard these products on a tip or on the side of the road, a feral pig could pick those up and transmit foot-and-mouth disease or African swine fever very easily.” Agriculture Victoria’s Animal Health and Welfare Director, Les Howard, has called FMD “number one on the exotic disease list for all countries around the world as their highest priority disease to control and eradicate where possible”. In February this year, Victoria’s Chief Veterinary Officer, Dr Graeme Cooke, said Australia had to approach animal disease awareness in the same way it prepares for natural disasters.

Australia has been free of FMD since 1872. The risk of it entering the country is estimated at less than 12 per cent. According to Animal Health Australia, there have been no reported cases of FMD in Australia, Timor Leste or Papua New Guinea. There is currently an active FMD vaccination program in Indonesia. (For further and updated information, go to the Emergency Animal Disease Watch Hotline on the Farm Biosecurity website.