38 WILD BIRDS 



The blackcaps are rarely heard so well as when high 

 among the close-set large trees in a plantation or 

 wood where there is little or no undergrowth. Such 

 spots seem to have some kind of sounding board for 

 blackcap notes. In low, dense thickets the effect 

 of their song is not so telling. It is the hollow grove 

 they need when great depths of green are forming 

 overhead ; whereas the thickets suit the powerful 

 nightingale equally well, or that packed song of 

 garden warblers. 



The nightingale's song is full of intense pulse or 

 throb which takes effect anywhere ; the blackcap's 

 song is far more delicate we never value the black- 

 cap at its true worth unless we hear it in the best 

 conditions for the carriage of sound. 



If you want to see our warblers, blackcaps, garden 

 warblers, whitethroats, grasshopper warblers and 

 nightingales at home in winter, if you want to hear 

 how they can sing in February, you must go to 

 Algeria. Go to the wild hill-side jungles at Hammam 

 Rhira, and there you shall see and hear warblers 

 indeed among the asphodel fields and the mastic 

 and mimosa and acacia bushes ; and among reeds 

 twenty feet high you may hear not only all these 

 singing together, but the wild, strange, loud notes 

 of turdoides, the great reed warbler, rarest of 

 English visitors. 



Or in spring go to Sicily and the Apennines for 

 the blackcaps and nightingales. Among the orange 

 and lemon trees dropping their ripening fruit in a 

 Sicilian garden, I found blackcaps singing all the 



