Common nightingale

Appearance

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

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 safeguard 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, 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.

Behavior

This section does not any. Please help improve this section by adding citations to reliable sources. Unsourced material may be challenged and. "
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.

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 safeguard 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, 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.This section does not any. Please help improve this section by adding citations to reliable sources. Unsourced material may be challenged and. "
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.

Cultural

* 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.
⤷  Franz Liszt's featured the nightingale's song in the Mephisto Waltzes No. 1.
⤷  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"...hieroglyph snipped... 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.