Topical Tens: 24 April: Nightingales

Monday 24 April 2017

24 April: Nightingales

The Nightingale is celebrated today in the French Revolutionary Calendar. Here are a few things you might not know about nightingales:

The word Nightingale dates back a thousand years, and meant night songstress in Anglo-Saxon, from the the Old English galan, "to sing". The collective noun for nightingales is a watch.
These birds are most famous for their song. They sing both during the day and during the night. Although poets are fond of referring to a singing nightingale as "she", it is only the males which sing, to attract a mate. Studies have shown that individual birds may have a song repertoire of over 200 different phrases. They also lose weight each night they sing - so the longer they can keep going, the fitter and stronger they are. In urban areas, they sing more loudly at dawn, to compete with the background noise. Early Christians noticed this and the birds became a symbol of a soul singing in anticipation of the second coming of Christ. They also considered the nightingale's song to be the cries of lost souls in purgatory.
The nightingale is the national bird of Iran, and the bird of the month of May.
They are small birds, about the size of a Robin. They have plain Brown plumage, and are sometimes mistaken for female robins.
They are often heard, but not seen. They tend to hide in thick foliage while they sing and are difficult to spot.
A Nightingale Sang in Berkeley Square was one of the most popular songs in Britain during World War II - but it was unlikely as they're not that common in London these days and the square doesn't provide the sort of habitat they like - forest and scrub. However, they used to be more common - in 1819 John Keats spotted one on Hampstead Heath and wrote a poem about it (Ode to a Nightingale).
Nightingales are native to Europe and south-west Asia. They are found in sub-Saharan Africa too, where they migrate for the winter. Spain, France and Italy have the biggest populations, numbering tens of thousands of pairs. In the UK, the biggest populations are in the south east - Essex, Suffolk, Norfolk, Kent and Sussex.
They eat a mixture of fruits, seeds, insects and nuts. They are eaten by Rats, foxes, Cats, birds of prey, large lizards and Snakes.
Nightingales are symbols of education and teaching, because the parents teach their young to sing.
There's a lot of mythology surrounding the nightingale. Because it sings by day and by night, it was believed they never slept at all, so when a groom in one legend wanted to punish his fiancée for continually putting off their wedding, he had her turned into a nightingale and condemning her to an eternity without sleep. (Though if she'd married him and had a baby the result would have been the same.) Putting a nightingale's eyes and heart in someone's drink will make them die of sleeplessness, according to folklore. Eating the nightingale's heart was once thought to inspire talent in artists, and their song was a good omen for those of a creative persuasion. There is an early Christian myth which says that nightingales die at three o'clock in the afternoon, the same time that Christ died on the cross.