Nightingale means night singer in Old English roots
Luscinia megarhynchos, the common or rufous nightingale, is a small chat famous for powerful nocturnal song. Once classed with thrushes, it now sits among Old World flycatchers, and its English name joins night with galan, meaning to sing.
Poets praised the bird for centuries because males deliver long, varied phrases after dark as well as by day. Genus Luscinia is simply Latin for nightingale; megarhynchos points to a large bill. Western birds breed across western Europe, North Africa, and Asia Minor and winter in tropical Africa; the Caucasian form spans the Caucasus and eastern Turkey into southwestern Iran and Iraq before East African winters.
Chats such as this one were long filed with the thrushes, but genetic analysis placed them among the Old World flycatchers, their thrush-like look the product of convergent evolution. A third subspecies breeds from the Aral Sea to Mongolia and winters on the East African coast. The bird is slightly bigger than a European robin at 15 to 16.5 centimetres, plain brown with a reddish tail, and the sexes look alike. It nests on or near the ground in thick vegetation and usually sings from cover, so it is far more often heard than seen.
The English name is more than 1,000 years old; the Old English form nihtegale meant night songstress, and early writers assumed the female sang, though only the male does. Europe holds an estimated 3.2 to 7 million pairs, yet in Britain, at the northern edge of the range, numbers fell 53 percent between 1995 and 2008, and a 2012 to 2013 survey counted around 3,300 territories. Poets have leaned on it since Homer's Odyssey; Virgil likened Orpheus's grief to its lament, and Shakespeare compared his love poetry to its song in Sonnet 102.
Source: Common nightingale
