174 London Birds. 



a radius of three miles from St. Paul's in any direction, except 

 due east, and find at the termination of the radius some spot 

 where there are tall elms, avenues of limes, orchards, or well 

 planted gardens, and there, if you have ears, you may enjoy, 

 any time during the month of May, the nightingale music. 

 And here it occurs to me to make a special note on London 

 songsters, that many true British residents are true migrants 

 as to London ; and all the true migrants come into song later 

 near London than elsewhere throughout the land. 1 have 

 heard the nightingale on the 2nd of April at Ringwood, Christ 

 Church, and Minster, in Dorset ; but never before the 15th or 

 20th at Stoke Newington. Shall I tell you that my heart leaps 

 within me to know that the builders, spite of their desperate 

 efforts, have not yet driven this queen of British song birds 

 from our district. The nightingales sung in Lordship Road 

 and over all our gardens, reaching as far back as Clissold's 

 Park, all through the season of 1864, just as if builders were 

 nonentities, and new bricks were as poetical as old trees, which 

 we all know they are not. At Stepney, Bromley, Bow, Old 

 Ford, and Stratford, the nightingale is unknown except in 

 books. Elsewhere in the three-mile circle it is a constant 

 visitant ; it loves trees, is rarely hunted by cats (which destroy 

 many thrushes), and has but one terrible enemy, and that is 

 the birdcatclier. 



The chaffinch, bullfinch, goldfinch, and linnet, are all 

 migrants in and about London. They ." come like shadows, 

 so depart/' Sometimes the air rings with the delicious but 

 brief and monotonous song of the chaffinch for days together 

 during May and June, and then we see no more of them for 

 months. So with the bullfinch ; they come down on the fruit 

 trees like swarms of locusts, eat their fill, and go away fat as 

 butter. As for the goldfinch, it is the rarest of all the finches 

 near London ; to see a group of them in late summer haunting 

 a patch of thistles, or taking toll in the kitchen garden where 

 there is a good crop of lettuce seed just ripe, is to have reason- 

 able occasion for making an entry in one's diary. The linnets 

 behave in a similar manner ; they come in clouds in autumn, 

 twitter, and disappear. Starlings come at all seasons, but 

 most of all in winter and spring, and then always in large 

 flocks, so that those who are wicked enough to shoot them 

 may fill a bag at every pull of the trigger ; that is if they can hit 

 a haystack, which few cockneys are able to do. Now and then, 

 daring winter, I see that rare but lovely little oddity, the siskin. 

 During the past few months several have appeared here, and 

 as of yore always careless, merry, full of antipodean feats, and 

 singing a song which is the most comical ever heard out of an 

 avicular larynx. All the tits haunt the London suburbs, and 



