Common Nightingale Facts

Common Nightingale Profile

There’s an unassuming little bird from Europe and Asia that doesn’t look like much but is packed with character.

Not only does it sing more intricately and for longer into the night than almost any bird, but it also gets up off its butt every year and migrates phenomenal distances to overwinter. 

The physical description of this animal suffices as: “Small, brown bird”, yet the nightingale is a creature that has inspired people from cultures all over Europe and Africa for thousands of years. 

Common Nightingale Facts Overview

Habitat:	Mild to warm, dense, low thicket growth or woodlands
Location:	Eurasia, North and Equatorial Africa
Lifespan:	Up to 8 years
Size:	Up to 16.5 cm (6.5 in) long
Weight:	Up to 23 g (0.8 oz)
Colour:	Brown on top and grey underneath
Diet:	Mostly insects and spiders, some berries
Predators:	Owls
Top Speed:	Unknown
No. of Species:	1
Conservation Status:	Least Concern (IUCN)

The nightingale is a tiny yet powerful bird and one that’s widespread throughout Eurasia, often overwintering in equatorial Africa.

It may be plain to look at, but its call is nothing short of spectacular.

Its name comes from its habit of calling well after sunset, and its repertoire, growing with its age, is so outstanding against the quiet backdrop that it’s made its way into folklore and into both classical and contemporary works of literature.

Interesting Common Nightingale Facts

1. They’re flycatchers

The common nightingale has that wide-mouthed gape of a thrush and was previously grouped in the thrush family Turdidae.

But it’s more recently been placed with the Old World flycatchers, the Muscicapidae; making it a relative of another European icon, the Robin.

While most of these birds spend their time in trees, a group of them are more terrestrial and are generally referred to as chats.

And chat is a good word to use because these little birds are very vocal.

¹

2. They have an incredible song

The nightingale song is highly variable between individuals, but this variability in itself is characteristic of the species. 

It’s not only variable but intricate, with whistles, trills, rattles and warbles, all composed in various amounts and orders and echoed from the understory of a wooded area where you’ll never be able to find them. 

And they make this call well into the late evening, a sound silhouetted against the quiet night sky when almost all other birds have gone to bed. This is what has lent them the night part of their name, which has been in use for over a thousand years. 

But if you hear one this late, it’s also a little sad, because only the lone males sing in the dark.

²

3. They duet

The majority of the energy spent singing so intricately is spent as an investment in breeding. Males sing to defend territories, but they sing extra hard to find a mate, and it is the males’ songs that are the most impressive. 

When a female is interested, they will team up in a duet, and there are two forms of collaborative song: an inserter will return her contribution somewhere between half a second and a second after the male has finished his.

An overlapper will return hers half a second to a second after he has started. 

We’ve likely all experienced this difference in our mates, but it isn’t clear whether one strategy is more successful than another. ³

4. They have a great memory

In order to get the female interested in the first place, the male spends his life acquiring more songs. During their developmental stages, they process and recall complex chains of audible information.

Researchers used recorded songs to test some of these mechanisms and discovered the birds pick up segments of tunes and package them together into groups of three to seven song types. 

This then became a repeatable package for the bird to recite, and they would be recited in varying order, regardless of the order in which they were learned. 

Curiously, it appears that the length of the package has no effect on how long the bird would use it. 

The impressive qualities of this tiny animal’s songs have, unsurprisingly, made it a popular bird to talk about. ⁴

5. They have been recognised for thousands of years

Homer’s Oddysey mentions nightingales, and spawns myths that later Chaucer would imitate. Shakespeare, too, wrote poems about them. The bird gained so much admiration from poets that it became almost mythical, considered a muse in and of itself, rather than simply a symbol of creativity.  

This species is the national bird of Ukraine and the official bird of Iran. In Persian poetry, the nightingale represents an unrequited yet passionate love. ⁵

6. Females prefer wider repertoires 

But the bird isn’t singing for human ears, as mentioned, they’re looking to pull. And in order to do so, they have to show off their pipes. 

Older males are more successful at mating than the younger, less experienced ones, and this is because they have a wider range of songs. So the complexity, spontaneity and range of this bird’s call is entirely what makes them attractive to females. 

Mature males can have up to 260 song variations, increasing substantially over their younger counterparts. Mating in this species is very competitive, and males will sing to show off how much stamina they’ve got.

When they are successful, males will change their songs and stop singing at night, staying in this pattern until after the eggs have been laid. 

Only about half of all males will be successful. The rest will be singing sadly into the evening and inspiring the next generation of morose poetry. 

7. They’re highly migratory 

The nightingale might be small but it’s incredibly tough. Populations as far North as Germany make it all the way down to Nigeria, and populations in the Middle East show up in Ethiopia and Uganda in the Winter months. 

Common Nightingale Fact-File Summary

Scientific Classification

Kingdom:	Animalia
Phylum:	Chordata
Class:	Aves
Order:	Passeriformes
Family:	Muscapidae
Genus:	Luscinia
Species:	megarhynchos

1. George Sangster (2010), “Multi-locus phylogenetic analysis of Old World chats and flycatchers reveals extensive paraphyly at family, subfamily and genus level”, Sci Hub.
2. European Wildlife by Lukáš Pich (2021), “Bird sounds – Common nightingale (Luscinia megarhynchos)”, YouTube.
3. Henrike Hultsch (1982), “Temporal performance roles during vocal interactions in nightingales (Luscinia megarhynchos B.)”, Springer Nature Link.
4. Henrike Hultsch (1982), “Memorization and reproduction of songs in nightingales (Luscinia megarhynchos): evidence for package formation”, Springer Nature Link.
5. Hūšang Aʿlam (1989), “BOLBOL “nightingale”, Encyclopaedia Iranica.