Nightingales, those glorious heralds of summer, really don’t have much to sing about. Far fewer females are around to be seduced by the males’ melodious notes, the scrubland they breed in is being munched away and they spend their tropical winters in the wrong place.
New research shows that English nightingales (there aren’t any in the rest of the UK) wing their way 3,000 miles to a specific region in and around The Gambia, Africa’s smallest country. By confining themselves to such a highly localised area, they stand less chance of survival when conditions turn bad.
Using tiny data-gathering backpacks, scientists from the British Trust for Ornithology (BTO) have discovered English nightingales don’t mix with their European cousins who scatter widely across the rest of West Africa, lowering their risk of succumbing to droughts, climate change and habitat loss.
Nightingales from Spain, France and Portugal can be counted in their millions but ours are in steep decline: numbers have dropped by 90% in recent decades to around 10,000 – and they are the only nightingales wintering in The Gambia. The country comprises stretches of land and coastline either side of its eponymous river and for three months every year these small, shy birds with sublime voices turn the area into the world’s most concentrated destination of any migratory bird.
I went to The Gambia one winter to make a film about local wildlife and saw how the needs of a growing human population – for firewood and food, as well as the demands of tourist development – are gnawing away at the natural ecosystems.
“Nightingales are stuck in a small area that’s probably not ideal,” Dr Chris Hewson, senior research ecologist at BTO, told me. “The Gambia has had two severe droughts and overgrazing by goats is having a big impact on the scrubby habitat the birds rely on. We think the situation there has got much worse since the 1960s and it’s over that period that our nightingale population has declined so severely. But if our birds were to move to a more suitable area of West Africa, they would find that nightingales from Europe had probably nabbed the best habitat.”
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So, it seems they are stuck with The Gambia and it’s not just the perilous, 6,000-mile round trip to the wrong place that adds to a nightingale’s woes. Here at home, their territory has shrunk and now these elusive birds can be heard, if not seen, mainly in Kent, Sussex and Essex.
On the Red List
Very early on a May morning I did see one, thanks to a songbird expert who took me to stretch of undergrowth where he knew there was a nest. We followed its distinctive melodies as, in the words of the poet Keats, it “singest of summer in full-throated ease”. Suddenly my friend pointed to the lowest branch of a young tree and there, singing its heart out, was a plain brown bird about the size of a robin, its visual appeal no match for its vocal talents. It was a wildlife moment to cherish, yet this inspiring creature has been on the UK’s Red List of birds in danger since 2015.
“Climate change predictions have suggested nightingales should get more common in the UK,” says Dr Hewson. “By the beginning of the next decade they should be in Yorkshire. But we are seeing the opposite – they are contracting southwards and the UK population is the only one in Europe showing a decline. Conditions have deteriorated here, but not as badly as they have in their part of Africa. Scrubland has been tidied up and muntjac deer graze on the vegetation where nightingales live and raise their young – so the birds are robbed of habitat and safety from predators. But there are still many areas in England suitable for nightingales; the simple truth is there aren’t enough birds to populate them.”
Scientists are hoping to use a new system of radio-receiving towers to track how many birds make it back to the UK and where on the migratory cycle mortalities occur. Yet prospects look bleak for the English nightingale. What a tragedy it would be if its song, first written about in Anglo-Saxon times, was forever silenced.
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