Bygone birding: 'shorely' a very unromantic habitat to discover recently-arrived nightingales

                                                                 

This extract is from Our Summer Migrants by J.E. Harting, published in 1875: 

The Nightingale has been pictured by poets and naturalists in various romantic situations, but perhaps never before in so unromantic a spot as  "under a bathing-machine"! 

Yet Mr. Monk states that on the 13th of April, 1872, there were  Nightingales "on the beach under the bathing-machines along the whole length of the shore at Brighton." 

The explanation which suggests itself is that the birds had just arrived, and they had sought the first place which offered a woody shelter.

It is true that it is a shady place although of a very different kind to that which the birds would have been accustomed.

                                           

                                           

* Cartoon of 'mermaids' and bathing huts in Brighton via Wikimedia Commons