60 LIFE AND SPORT IN HAMPSHIRE 



occurred in the midst of the sedge-warbler's song; 

 but there was no blackbird to fly off the cackle 

 was the sedge-warbler's, which almost in the same 

 moment was uttering one of his "pink" or chatter- 

 ing notes. 



Few people give this little bird his large due as 

 singer ; perhaps because he is associated with short, 

 jabbering outbursts during the day rather than with 

 the long, strange night songs. 



We have many blackcaps and many garden war- 

 blers at home, but it was in a Kent garden one June 

 day that I found myself in a very Eden of blackcaps. 

 Blackcaps are always fond of large gardens and shrub- 

 beries, but in this garden almost every flower bed, 

 with its bushy centre of shrubs, held one or two ; and 

 their song was at its full, pure and fresh to a degree 

 beyond which purity and freshness cannot go; wild 

 and wayward too. The blackcap at his best is a rare 

 musician. His passages are not so long as those 

 hurried, babbling ones of the garden warbler, which 

 near Deane in Hampshire I heard singing for sixteen 

 or twenty seconds without the least pause, and he has 

 not the instrumental power of the nightingale ; he has 

 none of the nightingale rush and rattle, trill and 

 shake; and he does not leave with the listener the 

 idea of burning passion. Nor has his voice carrying 

 power to speak of. At one spot among the chalk 

 hills and hollows I have often stood on a calm summer 

 night, and heard snatches of song from a nightingale 



