Human encroachment was bad enough for them but the soaring number of deer (particularly those ghastly muntjac) destroying habitat is pushing them to the brink. They do not like crowds.Īnd, of course, there’s a direct connection between the rarity of actually hearing one and a precipitous population decline: their numbers are thought to have fallen by 90 per cent in 50 years, down to barely 5,000 breeding pairs today. But that was in 1819. They’re unlikely to have been heard in Mayfair’s Berkeley Square since the days of King Alfred or earlier. It was once a relatively common sound, which is why it came to be so widely referenced. Keats is said to have heard the bird that inspired his ode in Hampstead (he reputedly wrote the poem in the garden of the Spaniards Inn) in what is now zone two of nine in modern London. Nightingales are really all about their song. And that you’re more likely to have seen the ruins of Sappho’s classical world in Greece than to have heard a nightingale sing in your own country. Fewer still will have seen one – though they’re so nondescript that this misses the point. There’s apparently no data on how many have (this might be an idea for an RSPB survey) but I’d hazard it would be in the low single digits percentage-wise. It’s something to do right now, this springĭespite this cultural prevalence, a vanishingly small number of people will ever have actually heard a nightingale sing. This is not one to defer to your bucket list, because at their current rate of decline it’s entirely possible that nightingales in the UK will die out before you or I do. Later Scott buys her a drawing of a nightingale as a memento of that night. Scott takes her to see Judy Garland appearing in a London production of A Nightingale Sang In Berkeley Square and afterwards they meet the singer backstage, with Howard going on to become her lifelong friend. There have been references in two of the most books I’ve read most recently, too. In The Green Hat by Michael Arlen, from 1924, the bright young narrator encounters one, caged and consequently sulkily mute, in a nightclub in Paris. And in Elizabeth Jane Howard’s 2002 memoir Slipstream, the author recalls one of her first dates with Peter Scott, the celebrated ornithologist and painter of birds, whom she would go on to marry. I first encountered the notion of them as a child reading Tintin, in which the staple comic character, the opera singer Bianca Castafiore, had the title ‘The Milanese Nightingale’ – something that initially confused me as Hergé portrays her as having a voice that would have one ducking for cover rather than listening rapt. They even provide the title of one of this year’s big computer game releases. Nightingales have been popping up everywhere for nearly 3,000 years, and occur in everything from the poetry of Sappho in 600BC to modern punk music, giving their name to a band that toured with the Clash. So I may as well get Keats and Berkeley Square out of the way immediately. But the cultural resonance of the world’s greatest songbird is much, much bigger than these recurring staples. There are two guaranteed reference points for any discussion about nightingales. And it’s this seductive sound that has given this tiny bird such a huge place in our culture. Nightingales have been winging their way from sub-Saharan Africa across Spain and France and into the wilder fringes of the southern part of England, where they are beginning their attempts to seduce each other by means of song. But the real highlight of the birdsong calendar is only now beginning in earnest: nightingale season. The first cuckoos are audible, skylarks are singing their hearts out, the dawn chorus is in full, joyous effect and more bitterns are booming than in decades.
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