Nightingales at Hothfield Heathlands in June

On 18th May this year the Natural History Museum of Berlin ran a field trip in the Tiergarten in the centre of the city to teach about the more than 3,000 nightingales that migrate to Berlin every year. 

On the Reserve up to 6 singing nightingales have been observed this year, which is a welcome increase on previous years. They nest on the ground, or very low to the ground under scrub or among nettles, a loose gathering of leaves with a lining of grass, roots and hair, so this is another species sensitive to disturbance by dogs. Dense low scrub provides a safe space for parents and young foraging for insects in the leaf litter. Only the males sing, through until mid-June, at night to attract a mate, in the day to warn off rivals, and not from a high perch but often low down in a hedge, easily observed.

From mid-June males help feed nestlings and only use an alarm call resembling the croak of a frog. Crowd-sourced recordings made in Berlin have revealed over 2000 song patterns, but an individual bird will work on unending variations of around 190. The trills, gurgles, and whistles are in scratchy contrast to the mellifluous invention of the bird singing in Berkley Square, indeed the almost mechanically precise hard rapid “beats” have been compared to techno music. Some nightingales have been recorded singing non-stop for 20 hours and they seem to sing at their loudest between around 11pm and 3am but I haven’t personally checked that. Britain is at the limit of the nightingale’s range.