50 THE BIRDS OF YORKSHIRE. 



Within the area of its regular summer range in the county, 

 the Nightingale usually occurs in limited numbers only. 

 Indeed it is only in the neighbourhood of Doncaster and 

 on the southern fringe of the county bordering Nottingham- 

 shire that it can be described as fairly abundant. To certain 

 secluded but more or less smoke-begrimed woodlands of the 

 Yorkshire Coalfield, in some instances scarcely beyond the 

 hum and " racket " of the pit-bank, as in the neighbourhood 

 of Barnsley, Wakefield, and Ackworth, this bird is an annual 

 visitant ; as also to pleasanter habitats in the neighbourhood 

 of the picturesque Abbey of Roche. In the central plain 

 it is regularly noted in the districts of Selby, Goole, York, 

 Harrogate, and Boroughbridge ; and in Holderness in 

 localities between Patrington and the Humber northward 

 and eastward to Beverley. 



Thus a line passing north by Rotherham and Barnsley, 

 and east of Wakefield, Leeds, and Harrogate to near Borough- 

 bridge, and then east through Skelton (five miles north of 

 York), and sweeping round the southern spur of the Wolds 

 up to Beverley, and finally reaching the North Sea about 

 Hornsea, circumscribes the portion of the county within 

 which the Nightingale is an annual summer visitor, while an 

 outer line from Sheffield, by Huddersfield, Bradford, Otley, 

 Ripon, and Thirsk, to Norman by-in-Cleveland, thence south- 

 east to Scarborough, includes all the localities for which 

 there is satisfactory evidence of the bird's ever having bred 

 or occurred ; and, moreover, accurately defines, according 

 to our present knowledge, the extreme northern and north- 

 western boundary of its distribution in the British Isles. 



It is interesting to note that the whole Yorkshire distribu- 

 tion of the Nightingale lies strictly within the lowlands, 

 and nowhere exceeds 250 feet above sea-level, except in 

 the single instance of its breeding in the Spa Gardens at 

 Harrogate. Indeed, the foot-hills of the Pennine Range, 

 of the Cleveland Hills, and even those of the Chalk Wolds, 

 form fringing barriers of the bird's range, and this, perhaps, 

 accounts for its rarity about Sheffield. These facts in the 



