Nightingale Haunts
Various urban and immigrant people write to me each year to ask where exactly they may hear the nightingale. The general rule doubtless is the further south-east the better. There are always nightingales in and about any spinney in Kent or Surrey ; but each enquirer might profitably kill two birds with one stone, so to say, by making a pilgrimage to Gilbert White's Selborne. His famous hanger is a spot favoured by many warblers, including the nightingale. For myself I never heard them in fuller song than in the neighbourhood of Pangbourne and Bradfield in Berkshire. The most westerly place where I ever heard them in song was Symond's Yat. There is evidence that they have extended their range to the West and, I think, to the •North in recent years. Nowhere in England have I heard quite such a chorus of warblers as by Paris Plage, and you hear nightingales even from the train between Le Havre and Paris. There must be thousands of small birds which funk the sea passage, including that most charming of mimics, the icterine warbler, of which I saw and heard a good deal in 1916.
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