CHAPTER X 



BIRD LIFE AT BINGHAM's MELCOMBE 



THE neighbourhood of Bingham's Melcombe is not 

 so favoured, as regards either the number of its 

 birds or the variety of their species, as some of 

 those which I have described in previous chapters. 

 There is little water or water-meadow, little bog, 

 no heather. The nightingale is common at 

 Melcombe Park, three miles away, but is a rare 

 visitor to Melcombe itself. The flint-bestrewn 

 ploughed fields on the uplands, and the " broad 

 backs of the bushless downs," do not afford the 

 kind of cover which attracts, in any number, the 

 sweetest songsters of distant Africa, the blackcaps, 

 the garden warblers, the white-throats, the willow- 

 wrens, which add so much to the melodies and the 

 charm of our English spring. There is not sedge 

 enough to attract the sedge-warbler with its night- 



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