THE IMMORTAL NIGHTINGALE 237 



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 dis- 

 tribution, 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 Mid- 

 lands, 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 practically 

 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 nightingale's range 

 is more restricted, but not by climatic conditions, and 



