THE GREAT MIGRATION 35 



It is the colonist of hedgerows and roadsides, and the special 

 song-bird of the wayfarer. Just when the nettles are shooting 

 tall, and all the undergrowth springing among the bleached 

 grass stems, the whitethroat returns to find his home made 

 ready for him. Usually he waits a fortnight or so to nest, by 

 which time the cover is thick and plentiful ; but in very early 

 Aprils there are sometimes white- 

 throats' nests with eggs by the end 

 of the month. Whether he is in 

 a hurry to nest or not, from the 

 first morning of his coming there 

 is no mistaking his passion for con- 

 versation. His notes are a kind 

 of pleasant springlike small-talk 

 rather than the passionate utterance 

 of the lark or nightingale, or even 

 the serious monologue of the chiff- 

 chaff or corn-bunting. At times 

 he is even a little ribald, with his guttural objur- 

 gations flung from the lee side of the thorns. His 

 characteristic way of singing is to begin on one side 

 of the hedge, toss above it in a broken song-flight, 

 and vanish, still in casual song, among the leaves in 

 the shelter beyond. The yellowhammer outlasts him 

 as the song-bird of the highways in later summer; but he 

 comes with a wonderful discourse of music to the hedges of 

 April and May. 



The song-flight of the tree-pipit is less familiar but more 

 marked. In some of the Welsh valleys from the middle of 

 April onwards the tree-pipits sing as perpetually as the 

 willow-wrens ; but in most English districts they are more 

 thinly distributed. They come to us about the middle of 

 April, and sometimes sing above the late spring snow, that 



