CHAPTER XXIII 



THE IMMORTAL NIGHTINGALE 



The barren days of early March — On the track of the absent 

 nightingale — The mystery of its return — The immortal 

 bird of the poets — Its puzzling distribution — The parish 

 nightingale — A rector's story of a nightingale — Birds striking 

 against window-panes — The nightingale a home-keeping 

 bird — Its human enemies — The fight to save our wild birds 

 — Educating the country children. 



NEVER is earth more empty of life than during 

 the early days of March before the first of 

 the migrants have returned to us. The 

 brighter sun serves only to show the nakedness of 

 nature and make us conscious of its silence. For since 

 the autumn, through all the cold, hungry winter 

 months, the destroyer has been busy among the 

 creatures that stayed behind when half the bird 

 population forsook the land; the survivors now seem 

 but a remnant. To-day, with a bleak wind blowing 

 from the north-east, the sun shining from a hard 

 pale grey sky, the wide grass and ploughed fields 

 seem emptier and more desolate than ever, and tired 

 of my vain search for living things I am glad to get 

 to the shelter of a small isolated copse, by a tiny 

 stream, at the lower end of a long sloping field. It 

 can hardly be called a copse since it is composed of 



no more than about a dozen or twenty old wide- 



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