234 ADVENTURES AMONG BIRDS 



when the bird inhabiting a particular copse or thicket 

 comes to an end, another will quickly take the vacant 

 place. The three counties of Hampshire, Surrey, and 

 Kent abound most in nightingales; they are a little 

 less numerous in Sussex and Berkshire; but these 

 five counties (or six if we add Buckinghamshire) 

 undoubtedly contain more nightingales than all the 

 rest of England together. The bird, coming to us 

 by way of France, travels north, each to his ancestral 

 place, the majority finding their homes in the south 

 of England, on its south-eastern side; the others 

 going north and west are distributed more thinly. 

 On a map coloured red to show the distribution, the 

 counties named above would show the deepest colour 

 over a greater part of the entire area; while north 

 and west there would be a progressive decrease in 

 the depth over the south-western counties, the home 

 counties north of the Thames, the Midlands, East 

 Anglia, and north to Shropshire and South Yorkshire, 

 where it would disappear. And on the west side 

 of England it would finish on the Welsh border 

 and in East Devon. In all of Devonshire west of 

 the valley of the Exe, with Cornwall; in practi- 

 cally all Wales and Scotland and Ireland, there are 

 no nightingales. 



It is a singular distribution, a puzzling one; for 

 why is it that the blackcap, garden warbler, wood- 

 wren, and other delicate migrants who come to us 

 by the same route, extend their range so much further 

 north and west ? We can only say that the nightin- 

 gale's range is more restricted, but not by climatic 



