SWEET PHILOMEL.

Auckland Star, Volume LXI, Issue 15, 18 January 1930, Page 7 (Supplement)

SWEET PHILOMEL.

AT THE NIGHTINGALE'S COURT

ENGLAND'S * FAVOURITE

SONGBIRD.

ATTRACTS MOTLEY ARRAY OP

VISITORS.

Of all the feathered visitors to the British Isles tho nightingale is the favourite songster, and he confines his activity to the. south-eastern English counties boidering on the Channel. In this area, close to the British metropolis, he is sought by the Londoner and by bird lovers from all over the British Isles. The annual pilgrimage of the British Empire Naturalists' Association to the Surrey Downs, the region most preferred by the nightingale, is attended by visitors from the United States, Canada, New Zealand, Australia, Africa, and India, most of them homesick British settlers who choose this way of renewing their home ties every year. It if? a strange motley of people that puzzles the railroad ticket offices in London by purchasing one-way fares to the tiny Surrey village of Clandon. The villagers are asleep wnen these " rusticators" assemble at the Onslow Arms and drink hot coffee at the bar where, a few hours previously, the natives have drunk their nightcap of British ale. Down the narrow village street Avith its old timbered houses, behind whose leaded-pane windows, hermetically sealed, the inhabitants are asleep, the visitors tramp until the rolling turf with ancient yew trees marks the beginning of the Down?. The soft moonlight makes faintly visible the 6heep tracks and chalk-pits of the Downs. Often the all-night birdwalkers cross the old Pilgrim's Road that led Chaucer's band to Thomas a Becket's shrine at Canterbury, and since the medieval pilgrim often took the road at night for his travels one likes to think that he, too, appreciated the nightingale's song. The ancient Pilgrim's Road, nov/ grass-grown, is still to be discovered, and is skirted by the bushe? under which the nightingales nest on the ground.

Neither Shy Nor. Secretive. On fint thought it seems incredible that such a throng of bird-walkers is able to get near any nightingale. But Daulias Luscinia is by no mean? a shy, secretive bird. He seems to like an appreciative audience. His admirers take no pains to lower their voices. One may approach to within a few feet of the nightingale, even flash an electric torch to discover his small brown body and swelling throat as he sings, perched fearlessly on a bough over the nest on the ground where his mate is sitting on four or five olive-brown eggs. During the night's pilgrimage, whenever a bird flags in his song, the birdwalkers whistle and chirrup to him, a'nd he immediately responds with a fresh burst of melody. A bird singing from a tree beside the road will continue his song even as a large automobile .roars past, flashing its strong searchlights on his tree. This lack of shyness, when the nest, is approached, is ascribed by naturalists to the nightingale's trust in the enshrouding darkness. But he also is a day performer, and even then may be approached closer than many of his feathered rivals. The nest rests on the ground under a bush, and in constructed of dead leaves, and lined with grass and sometimes wisps of horsehair. There is a definite nightingale line in England. The. fact that the songsters confine their annual sojourn in. England to the couth-eastern counties, neglecting Devon and Cornwall, and never go further north than the Midland counties is taken by many to indicate that nightingales are sun worshippers. Some naturalists maintain that the nightingale does, not like to make too long a pilgrimage, that it dislikes the sea, and prefers to settle in the region nearest the narrowest part of the Channel, which it crosses from France, just as it chooses the Straits of Gibraltar for its crossing to Europe from Africa instead of braving the Mediterranean.