Nature · Birds

Nightingale

Summer visitor · 15–16.5 cm

Luscinia megarhynchos — Muscicapidae (chats and Old World flycatchers)

A drab brown bird with an extraordinary song: loud, varied and delivered through the night by unpaired males, with deep fluty crescendos, rattling trills and a signature rising whistle. It has declined by more than 90% in Britain since the late 1960s and is now confined to dense scrub and coppice in the south-east, chiefly Kent, Sussex and Essex. Almost every classical reference to it is to the male, not the female.

How to spot them

▸The song, sung at night by unpaired males in late April and May: fluty crescendos, hard rattles and a long rising 'piu...piu...piu' whistle
▸Plain warm brown above with a distinctly rufous tail, often cocked and flicked
▸Bigger and longer-tailed than a robin, with a plain buff-grey breast and a large dark eye
▸Skulks in dense low scrub, coppice and blackthorn thicket — very hard to see
▸South-east England only: Kent, Sussex, Essex and the Suffolk coast

How to know it

Sings at night from dense scrub, with fluty crescendos, hard rattling trills and a long rising whistle that builds in volume

The nightingale's song — sung at night only by unpaired males.

Plain brown above with a rufous tail, larger and longer-tailed than the bird it is always compared with

Nightingale — bigger and plainer than a robin, with no red breast.

Declined by more than 90% in Britain since the late 1960s, and now confined to the south-east

Nightingale — Red-listed; strongholds are Kent, Sussex and Essex.

Its species name means 'big-beaked', and its genus is shared with the bluethroat

Nightingale — Luscinia megarhynchos.

Keats addressed an ode to it in 1819, calling it an 'immortal Bird'; it sings in Berkeley Square in a 1939 song

Nightingale — 'Ode to a Nightingale'; 'A Nightingale Sang in Berkeley Square'.

In Ovid it is the transformed Philomela, and in 1924 a cellist duetted with one in the BBC's first outside broadcast of wildlife

Nightingale — Beatrice Harrison's live broadcast from her Surrey garden.

A chat rather than a thrush, it winters in the scrub of West Africa south of the Sahara

Nightingale — family Muscicapidae.

Quick-fire facts

•Scientific name Luscinia megarhynchos; megarhynchos means 'large-billed', and the genus is shared with the bluethroat
•BTO BirdFacts gives about 5,550 territorial males (2012–13); the RSPB quotes around 6,700 breeding males, and the 2024 national survey gave roughly 5,500 singing males with a small increase on 2014
•It has declined by over 90% since the late 1960s, and the range contracted by about 43% between the 1968–72 and 2008–11 atlases
•Red-listed in Birds of Conservation Concern 5 (2021); it is not on Schedule 1 of the Wildlife and Countryside Act 1981
•Only unpaired males sing through the night; once a female arrives the bird sings mainly at dawn and dusk
•It is a chat, in the family Muscicapidae, not a thrush, and winters in West African scrub south of the Sahara
•In Ovid's Metamorphoses the nightingale is the transformed Philomela, and Greek poets called it aedon, 'the singer'
•Keats wrote 'Ode to a Nightingale' in 1819; the song 'A Nightingale Sang in Berkeley Square' dates from 1939
•In May 1924 the cellist Beatrice Harrison played a duet with a wild nightingale in her Surrey garden in the BBC's first outdoor wildlife broadcast
•The name comes from Old English nihtegale, 'night-singer'

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Sources

British Trust for Ornithology — BirdFacts: Nightingale
RSPB — Nightingale