Male nightingales advertise their skills as fathers through song.
If you know anything about nightingales, it’s probably that they sing. Written about by the likes of ancient Greek playwright Aristophanes and English poet John Keats, they’ve also inspired such composers as Beethoven and Stravinsky to pay homage to their melancholy warbling. But not all of their songs are mournful: In fact, male nightingales use some of them to advertise their skills as fathers. One of the many factors female nightingales consider when assessing prospective mates is their suitors’ paternal potential, and a 2015 study on the subject showed that better male nightingale singers are known to feed their children more often than their less-talented peers. “Better” here means singing in a more orderly fashion — repeating the same song types over and over — and varying their song choices, with plenty of buzzes, trills, and whistles.
Whereas it was previously thought that the size of a male’s repertoire was the sole criterion a female considered, in nightingales, the kind of song is crucial as well. Overall, male nightingales are known to be doting fathers — they visit their chicks’ nest as many as 16 times every hour, which is about as often as their mothers do.
For decades, the concert was legendary. Taking place on May 19, 1924, it paired cellist Beatrice Harrison with a singing nightingale in her garden, and was broadcast live by the BBC. Millions listened, tens of thousands wrote fan letters, and the concert was replayed every year until 1942. There’s just one problem: The nightingale didn’t actually sing. The concert was not meant to be faked, but it’s thought that the mix of recording equipment and people setting up scared the actual bird away, and an understudy of the human persuasion (likely a notable whistler named Maude Gould) was brought in as a replacement. The good news is that Harrison — a famed performer in her day known as the Lady of Nightingales — repeated the performance in later years, this time with actual nightingales.
