Tweet of the week
Nightingale
The nightingale is the latest instalment in Tweet of the Week, a series exploring Great Britain’s magnificent bird life
On May 19 1924, the BBC aired its first live outdoor wildlife broadcast. The setting was the Surrey garden of the cellist Beatrice Harrison. The recording featured an unlikely duet between Harrison and a nightingale she had noticed flying into her garden to sing whenever she rehearsed.
Their shared song produced an ethereal melody; the chirrups of the nightingale bombastic enough to stand out even over the strings of a cello.
Long heralded as the greatest vocalist of all British birds, the nightingale is having another moment in the spotlight. To mark today’s International Dawn Chorus Day, where radio stations will broadcast birdsong as the sun rises in their respective countries, the Royal Mail is producing a series of 10 commemorative stamps featuring the country’s best-loved birds. Chief among them is the nightingale.
Famous as it is, you will be fortunate to have ever seen or heard one. Since the Second World War, when Vera Lynn was crooning A Nightingale Sang in Berkeley Square, the bird’s population has plummeted. According to the British Trust for Ornithology, the number of nightingales – which are a spring migrant to these shores – fell by 61 per cent between 1989 and 2014.
The highest densities remain in Essex, Suffolk, Norfolk, Kent and Sussex. The Hoo Peninsula in Kent is the most important site in the country, although it is threatened by a proposed Ministry of Defence housing development.
Slightly larger than a robin, plain and brown, the nightingale prefers to sneak about in shrubbery rather than expose itself. Despite singing so bombastically at night, it isn’t considered a nocturnal animal and does most of its feeding and socialising during the day.
A few years ago, a research team from Switzerland deduced that the night-time chorus was in fact a song of seduction – the plaintive calls of males seeking a mate. Perhaps this is why the bird so appeals to the Romantics such as Keats, who wrote the famous Ode to a Nightingale.