[Sylvia atricapilla , L.) 
^jpHE Blackcap is a well-known member of the Sylvia dee, 
^ celebrated chiefly for its song. The birds forming this great 
family are generally of a delicate type, with an awl-shaped bill, 
but there are several aberrant forms. This one is known 
in Norfolk as the Mock Nightingale, and like that bird it 
sing-s far into the night. Bechstein says that the Blackcap 
rivals, and in the opinion of some surpasses, the nightingale’s song. 
“If” he adds, “it has less volume, strength, and expression, it is more 
pure, easy, and flutelike in its tones, and its song is perhaps more 
varied, smooth, and delicate.” It is a migratory bird; “in April, in 
the very first fine weather they come trooping, all at once, into these 
parts, but are never seen in winter. They are delicate songsters,” writes 
White, with whom the bird was a special favourite. “ Its note,” again 
he says, “has such a wild sweetness, that it always brings to my mind 
those lines in a song in ‘ As You Like It — 
‘And tune his merry note 
Unto the sweet bird’s throat.’ ” 
And no one has better characterised its song than he has done in another passage. 
“The Blackcap has in common a full, sweet, deep, loud and wild pipe; yet that 
strain is of short continuance, and his motions are desultory ; but when that bird 
sits calmly and engages in song in earnest, he pours forth very sweet, but inward 
melody, and expresses great variety of soft and gentle modulations, superior perhaps 
