Birds
Common Nightingale
Luscinia megarhynchos · also called nightingale, rufous nightingale
The common nightingale is proof that a bird does not need bright feathers to be one of the most celebrated animals in the world. It is a small, brown, skulking creature that almost nobody sees — and it has one of the greatest voices in nature.
Overview
Luscinia megarhynchos breeds across southern and central Europe, northwest Africa, and southwest Asia, in dense scrub and young woodland, and winters in sub-Saharan Africa. It is warm brown with a reddish tail, and it stays hidden low in thickets.
The voice
A male nightingale commands around 1,000 distinct sounds in some 200 phrase types — whistles, trills, gurgles, and long building crescendos — far beyond the range of most songbirds. Crucially, unpaired males sing at night, to catch females migrating overhead in the dark; once mated, they mostly switch to daytime song for territory.
A bird of literature
From the myth of Philomela to Keats’s ode, the nightingale has been a fixture of Western poetry and music for over two thousand years — always as a voice heard, not a bird seen. There are no nightingales in the Americas; references there usually mean a mockingbird or thrush.
Status
Least Concern globally but declining, with a roughly 90% fall in Britain since the 1960s as dense woodland understorey has been lost to neglect and deer.
Common Nightingale: common questions
Does the nightingale really sing at night?
Yes, and it is one of very few birds that regularly do. The night song comes almost entirely from males that have not yet found a mate. Females arriving from Africa migrate at night, and a male singing loudly in the darkness is advertising an unoccupied territory to any female passing overhead. Careful studies have shown that once a male pairs up, his nocturnal singing drops away sharply while his daytime singing, aimed at rival males, continues. So a nightingale heard at two in the morning is usually a bachelor. Nightingales also sing by day, but the dawn and daytime chorus of other birds tends to drown them out, which is part of why the night song is what people notice.
Why is such a dull-looking bird so famous?
Precisely because it is dull-looking. The nightingale delivers one of the loudest, most complex, and most emotionally charged songs of any European bird, and it does so unseen, from deep in a thicket, often in the dark. That combination, a magnificent voice with no visible source, is what made it a symbol in poetry and music for two and a half thousand years, standing for longing, grief, love, and the persistence of beauty in darkness. Writers from Sophocles to Keats to the lyricists of the twentieth century used it, and most of them, like most listeners, never actually saw the bird.
Is the nightingale in North America?
No. The common nightingale is an Old World species and does not occur in the Americas. When a nightingale is mentioned in an American context it is usually a misapplication of the name, or a reference to another fine songster such as the northern mockingbird, the hermit thrush, or the wood thrush, whose flute-like songs fill a similar role. Several unrelated birds around the world have been given nightingale in their common names for their singing, including the thrush nightingale of eastern Europe, which is a close relative, and various Asian and African species that are not.
Why are nightingales declining in Britain?
Two things are happening. On the breeding grounds, the bird needs low, dense, tangled vegetation, the kind produced by traditionally coppiced woodland and by scrub in its early years, and Britain has far less of that than it once did; where woodland is left unmanaged the understorey grows out of reach, and large deer populations browse away the low cover the nightingale nests in. On top of that, conditions in the African wintering areas and on the migration route, including drought in the Sahel, affect how many birds return. The result is a bird that was once widespread in England now largely confined to the southeast and still falling.