Our Summer Migrants: An Account of the Migratory Birds Which Pass the Summer in the British Islands.Harting, James Edmund
Science
Our Summer Migrants: An Account of the Migratory Birds Which Pass the Summer in the British Islands.
Harting, James Edmund
Birds -- Great Britain
No more favourable locality for this species could be found, perhaps,
than that wherein they were soonest observed—namely, the neighbourhood
of Ratham, in Sussex. Situated on the flat country between the downs and
the sea, about three miles from the former and seven from the latter,
with an arm of harbour within two miles, it offers, with its attractions
of wood and water, a tempting resting-place to these small winged
invaders on their arrival, and furnishes, moreover, a fine post of
observation to the inquiring naturalist. Here, throughout April and May,
the woods of West Ashling and the copses around Kingley Vale resound
with the songs of various warblers, but especially of Nightingales,
which find in this safe retreat an immunity from traps which is not
everywhere accorded them. On April 10 their remarkable note was detected
at Reigate; on the 12th they were singing at East and West Woodhay, in
Berkshire; while from the last-named date until April 18 they were daily
noticed in various parts of Norfolk and Suffolk. From thence, through
Leicester, Derby, and Nottingham, we trace this bird to Yorkshire, where
on May 5 we find it at Barnsley, the temperature, according to that good
observer Mr. Lister, standing at 50°, and the wind W. Further north than
this in 1872 there were no tidings of it, although in former years I
have both seen and heard it in the woods by the waterside at Walton
Hall, near Wakefield, and have been informed of its occurrence five
miles to the northward of York.
I had proposed in these “General Observations” to confine attention
strictly to the facts disclosed by “The Field Calendar;” but the subject
of the distribution of the Nightingale in England is of such interest to
ornithologists, and even to those who, without professing to be
naturalists, take a pleasure in listening to the bird, and are not
unwilling to learn something about it, that I venture to give an extract
from another source which I feel assured will be considered most
instructive.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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