Nightingale folklore runs deep in European culture, in both high literature and unwritten, long forgotten, stories; it appears in countless plays, artistic impressions, poems and pieces of music. For the nightingale has been used as a symbol of love, spiritual essence, and melancholy since ancient Greece, and probably long before. It has acquired this status not by its looks or familiarity, but by its near mythical song. 

In appearance it is more or less a robin without the redbreast. It is a uniform warm brown, with a paler belly, although it does have a tail with a distinctive chestnut-red coloration. It is often the tail that draws the eye as the bird flits into the recess of a deep dark bush. Small woodland birds are rather skulking and are more easily heard than seen. This is certainly the case with nightingales, as they tend to sing from the cover of dense thorny scrub.  In fact, this is the nightingale’s preferred habitat, and the more tangled the dense thickets in an overgrown coppiced woodland, the better. Although they will nest on heaths and commons with patches of thick scrub.  

In Norfolk we are at the northern limit of the bird’s geographical range, with the species being most numerous in the western Mediterranean. It winters in sub-Saharan Africa arriving back in the UK during early May. A 1982 survey of nightingale across Norfolk gave its population, based on singing males, at approximately 325 pairs. Estimates currently put numbers well below one hundred pairs, with most of these being concentrated in the south-west of the county.  

Despite it being long ago, I clearly recall the first time I heard a nightingale. I was a young soldier on manoeuvres in the heart of the Norfolk Brecklands, at the Army’s Stanford Training Area. Being a junior member of the platoon, I was given the 01.00 hrs to 03.00 hrs ‘stag’ duty. Laying quietly among the bracken, listening for the approach of an imaginary enemy, I was serenaded throughout by a nightingale. It sung continuously, with only the occasional pause, and despite having not heard one before, I knew instantly it was a nightingale.  

Bird song is difficult to describe in words, and many better than I have tried. A nightingale’s song is rich, varied and vigorously performed, but it must be heard rather than described. Delivered in the dead of night, deep within a dark wood, makes it emotive, powerful, and poignant. The listener, particularly if alone has a profound sense of the moment and kinship with the natural world. Although, beware, robins will sing at night, especially if a streetlamp is nearby. The romantics among you may be disappointed to know that the nightingale that sang in Berkeley Square was highly likely a robin. And like robins, nightingales will sing during the day.          

One of the many myths concerning nightingale is that they press their chest against the point of a thorn, and it is this act that perhaps adds the perception that they suffer for their song. It can be, even for a natural historian, difficult not to be carried along on a wave of sentimentality at the song of the nightingale. Unfortunately, humans being humans, it is not enough to delight at nature, we must own it, both metaphorically and literally. In 1819 when John Keats’s famous ‘Ode to a nightingale’ was published, his mournful, but loving words for the ‘light-winged dryad of the woods’ was in stark contrast to the thousands of nightingales that were trapped, caged and sold for a penny on market stalls in the East End of London. 

Although this awful act led to glimpses of early conservationism, as Mark Cocker describes in his book ‘Birds Britannica’, “Even at this time, it was opposed by a few enlightened souls for its profligate waste of life, since nightingales make poor prisoners”. During the month of May the gutters of Whitechapel were littered with dead songbirds. A sad attempt to bring a half remembered pastoral life into the city perhaps. The village woodlands that lay around London would be robbed of their nightingale, and much to the displeasure of the locals. However, this dreadful trade gives us a glimpse of the abundance of nightingale 200 years ago.  

By the 1920s things had improved for the nightingale, city dwellers would now take coach excursions to woodlands were ‘abundant nightingale song could be heard’. This fascination for nightingale was further enhanced by improved sound recording, and between 1924 and 1935 the celebrated musician, Beatrice Harrison, recorded cello performances for BBC radio. It was utterly unique for the time, being live, in her Surrey garden and accompanied by a nightingale. It was a huge broadcasting success, with millions of people tuning in each year. The occasion was revived during the spring of 1940, as a boost for ‘dear old England’, but during the performance the unnerving hum of distant German bombers en-route to the London docks could clearly be heard.    

At the time of my writing nightingales are still singing in a few favoured spots around Norfolk, although by mid-June their voices have waned away. I could tell you where to look, but easily available information has, in some way, spoiled exploration. So, by next May why not discover where nightingale sing for yourself, venture in at dusk, find a spot to sit and do nothing but listen. For in our technological age, searching, discovering and listening to a nightingale is a truly marvellous thing to do. But you may have to hurry, they are disappearing at an alarming rate.  

The reasons for the nightingale’s decline as a breeding bird in the UK are clear. Of course, mist netting in southern Europe and North Africa takes its toll, as does habitat loss in their wintering grounds. But their numbers are just about holding across the continent (due in part to the recovery of European beaver). The loss of managed coppiced woodland was an initial cause for a drop in the UK nightingale population. But the over-grazing of our woodland understorey by an increasing deer population, particularly the ubiquitous non-native muntjac, is proving to be a major factor in their more recent and sharpest decline. Along with other insectivorous birds, a lack of food for their offspring is possibly an issue, as is increased predation of eggs and chicks.             

The English poet Edward Thomas wrote of the nightingale: “They bare to us that the Earth is something more than a human estate, and that there are things not human yet of great honour and power in the world.” For our continuing co-existence with creatures such as nightingale, it is time we heeded these words.