The common nightingale or simply nightingale, also known as rufous nightingale, is a small
passerine bird best known for its powerful and beautiful song. It was formerly classed
as a member of the thrush family Turdidae, but is now more generally considered to be
an Old World flycatcher, Muscicapidae. It belongs to a group of more terrestrial species,
often called chats.
Description
The common nightingale is slightly larger than the European robin, at 15–16.5 cm
length. It is plain brown above except for the reddish tail. It is buff to white below.
Sexes are similar. The eastern subspecies L. m. hafizi and L. m. africana have paler
upperparts and a stronger face-pattern, including a pale supercilium. The song of the nightingale
has been described as one of the most beautiful sounds in nature, inspiring songs, fairy tales,
opera, books, and a great deal of poetry.
Distribution and habitat It is a migratory insectivorous species breeding
in forest and scrub in Europe and south-west Asia, and wintering in west Africa. It is
not found naturally in the Americas. The distribution is more southerly than the very closely related
thrush nightingale Luscinia luscinia. It nests on or near the ground in dense vegetation.
Research in Germany found that favoured breeding habitat of nightingales was defined by a number
of geographical parameters. less than 400 m above mean sea level
mean air temperature during the growing season above 14 °C
more than 20 days/year on which temperatures exceed 25 °C
annual precipitation less than 750mm aridity index lower than 0.35
no closed canopy In the UK the bird is at the northern limit
of its range which has contracted in recent years, placing it on the amber list for conservation.
Despite local efforts to conserve its favoured coppice and scrub habitat, numbers fell by
53 per cent between 1995 and 2008. A survey conducted by the British Trust for Ornithology
in 2012 and 2013 recorded some 3,300 territories, with most of these clustered in a few counties
in the south-east of England, notably Kent, Essex, Suffolk, Cambridgeshire and East and
West Sussex. By contrast, the European breeding population
is estimated at between 3.2 and 7 million pairs, giving it green conservation status.
Behaviour and ecology Common nightingales are so named because they
frequently sing at night as well as during the day. The name has been used for more than
1,000 years, being highly recognisable even in its Anglo-Saxon form – 'nightingale'.
It means 'night songstress'. Early writers assumed the female sang when it is in fact
the male. The song is loud, with an impressive range of whistles, trills and gurgles. Its
song is particularly noticeable at night because few other birds are singing. This is why its
name includes "night" in several languages. Only unpaired males sing regularly at night,
and nocturnal song is likely to serve to attract a mate. Singing at dawn, during the hour before
sunrise, is assumed to be important in defending the bird's territory. Nightingales sing even
more loudly in urban or near-urban environments, in order to overcome the background noise.
The most characteristic feature of the song is a loud whistling crescendo, absent from
the song of thrush nightingale. It has a frog-like alarm call.
Relationship with humans The common nightingale is an important symbol
for poets from a variety of ages, and has taken on a number of symbolic connotations.
Homer evokes the Nightingale in the Odyssey, suggesting the myth of Philomela and Procne.
This myth is the focus of Sophocles' tragedy, Tereus, of which only fragments remain. Ovid,
too, in his Metamorphoses, includes the most popular version of this myth, imitated and
altered by later poets, including Chrétien de Troyes, Geoffrey Chaucer, John Gower, and
George Gascoigne. T.S. Eliot's "The Waste Land" also evokes the common nightingale's
song. Because of the violence associated with the myth, the nightingale's song was long
interpreted as a lament. The common nightingale has also been used
as a symbol of poets or their poetry. Poets chose the nightingale as a symbol because
of its creative and seemingly spontaneous song. Aristophanes's Birds and Callimachus
both evoke the bird's song as a form of poetry. Virgil compares the mourning of Orpheus to
the “lament of the nightingale”. In Sonnet 102 Shakespeare compares his love
poetry to the song of the common nightingale:
"Our love was new, and then but in the spring, When I was wont to greet it with my lays;
As Philomel in summer's front doth sing, And stops his pipe in growth of riper days:"
During the Romantic era the bird's symbolism changed once more: poets viewed the nightingale
not only as a poet in his own right, but as “master of a superior art that could inspire
the human poet”. For some romantic poets, the nightingale even began to take on qualities
of the muse. Coleridge and Wordsworth saw the nightingale more as an instance of natural
poetic creation: the nightingale became a voice of nature. John Keats' "Ode to a Nightingale"
pictures the nightingale as an idealized poet who has achieved the poetry that Keats longs
to write. Invoking a similar conception of the nightingale, Shelley wrote in his “A
Defense of Poetry":
"A poet is a nightingale who sits in darkness and sings to cheer its own solitude with sweet
sounds; his auditors are as men entranced by the melody of an unseen musician, who feel
that they are moved and softened, yet know not whence or why.”
Cultural depictions The Aēdōn is a minor character in Aristophanes's
414 BC Attic comedy The Birds. The love of the nightingale for the rose is
widely used, often metaphorically, in Persian literature.
"The Owl and the Nightingale" is a Middle English poem about an argument between these
two birds. John Milton's sonnet "To the Nightingale"
contrasts the symbolism of the nightingale as a bird for lovers, with the cuckoo as the
bird that called when wives were unfaithful to their husbands.
Samuel Taylor Coleridge's "The Nightingale: A Conversation Poem", printed in 1798, disputes
the traditional idea that nightingales are connected to the idea of melancholy.
Ludwig van Beethoven's Symphony No. 6, the "Pastoral Symphony", includes in its second
movement flute imitations of nightingale calls. John Keats's "Ode to a Nightingale" was described
by Edmund Clarence Stedman as "one of our shorter English lyrics that still seems to
me... the nearest to perfection, the one I would surrender last of all" and by Algernon
Charles Swinburne as "one of the final masterpieces of human work in all time and for all ages".
The beauty of the nightingale's song is a theme in Hans Christian Andersen's story "The
Nightingale" from 1843. A recording of nightingale song is included,
as directed by the score, in "The Pines of Janiculum", the third movement of Ottorino
Respighi's 1924 symphonic poem "Pines of Rome". Igor Stravinsky based his first opera, The
Nightingale, on the Hans Christian Andersen story and later prepared a symphonic poem,
The Song of the Nightingale, using music from the opera.
In 1915, Joseph Lamb wrote a rag called "Ragtime Nightingale" that was intended to imitate
the nightingale calls. "A Nightingale Sang in Berkeley Square" was
one of the most popular songs in Britain during World War II.
A nightingale is depicted on the reverse of the Croatian 1 kuna coin, minted since 1993.
References
External links Ageing and sexing by Javier Blasco-Zumeta
& Gerd-Michael Heinze High-quality Nightingale sound file, The Freesound
Project:. Retrieved 14 April 2012. Nightingale song and behavioural ecology
Nightingale videos, photos & sounds on the Internet Bird Collection
Rose and nightingale in Persian art Royal Society for the Protection of Birds
Nightingale Nightingale, Retrieved June 11, 2007.
Uncompressed high-quality Nightingale sound file, The Freesound Project,. Retrieved 14
April 2012.