Animal · Spain, France, Italy
Common nightingale
Luscinia megarhynchos — the name this animal has in the language scientists everywhere share.
The nightingale is a plain brown songbird, hardly bigger than a sparrow, famous for the loud and endlessly varied song the males pour out at night. It is far easier to hear than to see.
Picture credit: Hyppolyte de Saint-Rambert (CC BY 4.0) · D2swirl (CC BY-SA 4.0) · Marie-Lan Taÿ Pamart (CC BY 4.0) · Wikimedia Commons
Where does the common nightingale live?
Home: Dense thickets and woodland edges in Europe and West Asia.
In the wild it lives in these countries: Spain, France, Italy, Germany, Poland, Greece, Türkiye.
Conservation status from the IUCN: not in danger.
The short profile
Fully grown: 15-16 cm long, about 21 g. It weighs about 0 021 kilograms. On the menu: insects.
The story behind it
A nightingale looks ordinary: warm brown above, pale below, with a reddish tail that shows when it flits into cover. The song is the opposite of ordinary. A male has around two hundred different phrases in his head and strings them together in long bursts of whistles, trills and sudden silences. Unpaired males sing in the middle of the night, when almost no other bird is calling, so a passing female cannot miss them. At dawn the same bird sings again, this time to tell neighbouring males where his territory ends. Nightingales spend the winter in Africa south of the Sahara and return to Europe in April to nest low in dense scrub.
Find it on the globe
Common nightingale is there as a tiny animated figure that breathes and looks around. From far away the planet is only a blue ball; detail arrives as you zoom in, and this one appears once you are close enough. Open it on the globe.
It sits at its real coordinates, not near them — the same numbers listed in the facts above. Switch off the layer for this kind of place and it disappears again; the buttons for that are down the right-hand edge.
Questions children ask
Why do nightingales sing at night?
Only males that have not yet found a mate sing at night. In the dark almost nothing else is singing, so the song carries far and a female flying over cannot miss it. Once a male is paired, the night singing stops.
What does a nightingale look like?
Rather dull, which surprises many people. It is a small brown bird with a pale breast, dark eyes and a reddish tail, and it keeps to thick bushes, so you will usually hear it long before you spot it.
Where do nightingales go in winter?
In Africa south of the Sahara. The birds leave Europe in late summer, cross the desert and return in April, often to the very same patch of scrub they nested in the year before.
Where these numbers come from
Every figure on this page was checked against public reference sources before publication. Where sources genuinely disagree, the text says so.
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