150 BEITISH LAND BIRDS. 



other of our British, birds the necessary requisites 

 of a first-rate songster ; its voice being unrivalled 

 in volume, quality, and execution. With its 

 music we are all acquainted ; but its habits are so 

 concealed, its disposition so retiring, that it is very 

 little we can learn about it in a state of nature. 

 An accurate observer says, " I watched them very 

 carefully for more than five years, in a place 

 where these birds are very abundant ; and at the 

 end of that time I was about as wise as at the 

 beginning." 



The nightingale is first heard about the middle 

 or end of April ; its song continues till the first or 

 second week in June. The birds taken in the 

 county of Surrey are said to possess the finest 

 quality of song. Its favourite haunts are woods, 

 plantations, and hedgerows. In the midland coun- 

 ties it is scarce ; in the northern, but occasionally 

 heard; and in the western, namely, Devonshire 

 and Cornwall, almost unknown. It is not found at 

 all in the north of Great Britain, although it visits 

 the more temperate parts of Russia, and some parts 

 of Siberia. The migration of nightingales, like 

 all other regular migrations, is from north to south 

 in autumn, and back again in spring ; an English 

 nightingale would, probably, go to Morocco ; a 

 Russian nightingale to Egypt, 



That ardent lover of nature Isaac Walton has 



