* * * * April 17
It has been said—in a book—that the nightingale is usually heard in the Home Counties on April t7th. Such a syn- chronism is doubtless over-precise ; but the punctuality of the arrival of some of our summer visitors is a thing to marvel at. Again and again those who keep diaries find that they have seen their first swallow and heard their first nightingale and cuckoo almost on the same day year after year. The birds, one is inclined to deduce, are influenced astronomically. Not a favouring wind, not the coming of warmth, not the appearance of the desired food, but the height of the sun is the master influence. There rises a tide of life within their tiny frames which urges them to begin song and northerly flight. How strange it is that almost all these many species that come here in the spring and that leave us in the autumn should be driven by an irresistible instinct to seek a mate at the most northerly point of their voyage ! " True and tender is the North." The magnetic needle is not more obedient to its influence than the heart of the bird, with the nightingale who nests in England or the goose that nests in Labrador or Spitzbergen.
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