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NIGHTINGALE
  Bird Call
| Characteristics: |
16.5 cm long and weighs between 24 and 28 g. A bird with rather featureless plumage that is one of the best singers in Europe. It is essentially warm brown above, lighter below with a bright rusty tail. Both sexes have the same colouring. |
| Call: |
Its contact call is a soft huit, but also a harsher, almost frog-like krrr sound when nervous. Its song begins with a rising series of took took calls that become louder and faster and end in a sobbing crescendo. Sings by day as well as at dusk and at night and mostly while perched deep in the cover of trees or bushes.
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| Habitat: |
The Nightingale can be found in larger overgrown gardens, graveyards, parks with damp thickets, deciduous and mixed woodlands with abundant ground cover.
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| Distribution: |
It is a summer visitor to Central and Southern Europe between April and October but in Britain it is confined to the south-east as a breeding species. |
| Biology: |
The Nightingale forages for its food on the ground. Its food consists of insects and their larvae, spiders, snails, worms and other invertebrates as well as berries. The nest is built on the ground and hidden in dense and creeping shrubbery, in nettle bushes or similarly dense vegetation. The clutch consists of 4 to 6 olive-brown eggs. 1 brood a year; clutches from the beginning of May.
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