AFRICAN NIGHTINGALE
By JULIAN HUXLEY
ON my first English Sunday after three months in West Africa I heard the Surrey nightingales in full song. Listening to them, my thoughts went back to the time when I had last heard a nightingale singing—in early February, at Enugu, administrative centre for the Eastern Provinces of Nigeria. I had taken advantage of a blank two hours in our heavy programme of committee-work to take my field-glasses and wander out into the scrub beyond my host's garden. A flock of bee-eaters with their graceful flight and brilliant green-and-yellow colouring had alighted on a tree ; a guinea- fowl had flown off explosively ; I had seen a beautiful but still un- identified bird, all dark purple above and white below ; and then. suddenly from a thicket came the song of a nightingale, only a snatch and not at full force, but unmistakable. I waited and was rewarded by hearing it twice more. I looked the matter up in Bannerman's great work, The Birds of West Africa (which, in an agreeable British way, we have made an official issue to all administrative centres abthre a certain grade) and found that up till less than 20 years ago .the orthodox view was that nightingales never sang in their African winter quarters, but that since then indisputable proof had accumu- lated that they did so. And two days later the evidence of my ears was confirmed by an official who had frequently heard ".• nightingales in the neighbouring district of Awka, on one occasion, five singing simultaneously.
While on the subject, I cannot forbear from retailing a story I was told in the Gold Coast about a lecturer recently sent out by the Ministry of Information. At Tamale, administrative capital of the Northern Territories, in the course of a talk on life in Britain, he had spoken of the English spring and of the songs of the English birds such as the cuckoo and the nightingale. Here he paused and asked if any Africans in the audience knew what these songs were like. One said yes. " Ah, then you have lived in England? " "No, sah." " Well, how do you know then? " " Slow movement Beethoven Pastoral Symphony, sah." The lecturer was somewhat shattered at this. Afterwards it was explained that the Director of Veterinary Services has his boy play classical music on the gramo- phone for an hour every evening and had tried out the effect on
his trained African veterinary assistants. Almost all of them were uninterested, but one had taken to it and had acquired a real knowledge of the musical classics.
A nightingale singing in Central Africa seems peculiarly strange, yet as a matter of fact many migrants sing in their winter quarters. You may, for instance, often hear blackcaps warbling away in the Italian winter, and I have myself heard the willow warbler in full song both in East and West Africa. Frequently, however (as with the nightingale) the song is not given at full intensity, and there are some migrants which appear never to sing except in their breeding-quarters. The real strangeness lies in the basic fact that birds, even tiny and delicate species like our warblers, should be able regularly to winter in Central or South Africa in spite of the fifteen-hundred-mile inhospitality of the Sahara. There are, of course, some which migrate up the valley of the. Nile, but many find the way across the waterless west coast or possibly even acros the Central Sahara.
Almost the commonest bird which I observed in West Africa was the yellow wagtail, that familiar inhabitant of green English water- meadows (or, to be more accurate, the blue-headed wagtail, which is the sub-specific form in Western Europe). Tree-pipits were not un- common in several areas. I saw white wagtails (European representa- tives of our pied sub-species) at Port Etienne, that spot so waterless that all drinking water for the local R.A.F. has to be distilled from sea water. And at the same spot I was given a ring off the leg of a Sandwich tern that must have been hatched in Holland, as the ring was from a Dutch University. Whinchats are common objects of the West-African winter landscape, perched on telegraph wires by preference. Some of our own kestrels migrate to Central Africa and one showed himself to me in Central Nigeria. At Kano I saw a wheatear, and at Zaria a European Hoopoe.
Many other of our warblers besides the willow warbler winter in Central Africa, but without hearing their song they are difficult to identify ; however, I thought I saw both reed and sedge warblers by a river near Accra, keeping company with white egrets, snake- birds, pigmy and giant kingfishers, parrots and other exotic creatures. From mid-March onwards European swallows begin to appear along the coast, slowly moving west and north to be in time for our spring, and at Bathurst I saw some house-martins. In spite of the fact that our common swift, like our swallows and house-martins, winters in South Africa, I saw none on passage along the coast, though they were abundant in Rabat in mid-April.
Several of our seabirds migrate to West Africa in winter. I have mentioned the ringed Sandwich tern from Port Etienne, but this handsome species is not uncommon all along the West African coast. The graceful black tern, only a passage-migrant in Britain, is a characteristic European species nesting in fresh-water marshes and pools ; in its winter plumage it is extremely common at harbours such as Lagos and Freetown. I also saw black-headed and lesser black-backed gulls (the latter, I think, of the continental sub-species), but these do not range farther south than Senegal and the Gambia.
Some of the most characteristic of West African birds in winter arc waders from Europe—the common sandpiper is as abundant and as much at home on the shores of the Gold Coastlar Sierra Leone as on Welsh lakes or Scottish rivers (and apparently a good deal more approachable). Greenshanks arc common and conspicuous ; whimbrels and curlew not infrequent (the curlew's call sounds as un- African as the nightingale's song); and there are several other waders familiar as passage-migrants in Britain. Finally, I must mention our own heron as standing out unfamiliarly among the night herons, reef herons, squacco herons, buff-backed herons, and egrets of Africa, in frequent company of the purple heron, whose breeding range extends from Holland to the African Equator.
These are only a small sample of the English or West European birds which migrate to or through West Africa in winter—merely such as I happened to be able to see in the odd hours of a strenuous three months' tour—but they will serve as reminders of the astonish- ing strength of the migratory impulse, developed to an ever higher pitch under the stress of natural selection as ncw and more northerly breeding grounds became available to birds with the retreat of the ice after the last glacial maximum.
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