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NIGHTINGALE 



THE FULL CHORUS 



May is the great time of the singing of birds ; every one of 

 our song-birds sings during this month, and most of them 

 sing so well, or so long, in no other. The nightingale sings 

 all through May, as compared with ten days or a fortnight in 

 April and rather less in June. The latest group of spring 

 migrants, such as the turtle-dove and nightjar, are not often 

 heard before May comes in ; and although neither has a song 

 in the full sense of a thrush or a skylark, their contrasted 

 murmurs lend much of their beauty of sound to the May days 

 and nights. The reed-warbler and rarer marsh-warbler 

 are fluent and brilliant singers which do not arrive in their 

 wet haunts till well on in the month. These later visitors 

 are all as vocal in early and middle June as in May ; but by 

 that time there is a great diminution in the total volume of 

 song. Even in the last few days of May the hatching of 

 innumerable broods silences a very large proportion of singing 

 birds ; and the second and third weeks are the time when the 

 daily chorus is at once most varied and fullest. A few early 

 or rather half-hearted singers, such as the missel-thrush and 

 wheatear and stonechat, often cease singing for the season 

 very early in the month ; and for them we must listen, if by 

 any chance we have not noticed them earlier, in the days when 



