"Just the time for nightingales," said the wise person of the house. She meant, of course, that in cold December, the sound of joy and exuberance helps to give a lift to the spirit. So out came the wonderful CD made by the French company of Sittelle, and the house throbs into a different music. Now our own song thrush has broken into its morning serenade after a period of silence and we give thanks for that. And the robin is also a sweet songster, if limited in range, but this presentation of nightingales in various parts of Europe carries also as background other birds and makes a medley, so to speak. The nightingale has been prized as far back as AD77, when Pliny remarked that the best singers among them could command the price normally given for slaves. Are these birds as powerful of voice as often claimed? In the 18th century, a surgeon was persuaded to dissect a number of nightingales and found that they had the most developed larynx of any bird of comparable size. And Richard Mabey tells us that in 1992, two behavioural scientists at the Free University of Berlin caught nightingale nestlings, isolated them and tutored them by playing tapes of bird song. They found that the birds could often repeat complex sequences of up to 60 different phrases after hearing them once a day for two or three weeks. Their short-term memory alone could accommodate seven song sequences, each nearly a minute long.
The first part of the entertainment begins in a forest in northern Greece. Glorious song, but also the background in all recordings, listing the characters, is fascinating too, and the birds, etc., are named - in the accompanying booklet. In a wood in the Ile de France we get our first cuckoo. Boring, in a way, because unlike others he has only one thing to say "Cuckoo", as against the versatility of the master player. Also joined by a blackbird, cockerel and a wood-pigeon. The plot thickens at a small lake near Bresse, where Philomela the nightingale is joined (in the background, of course) by "edible frogs" in good voice. Does an edible frog sound different to an ordinary frog? And before you can divert your mind from the glorious birdsong, you are into a Scops Owl - sounding more like a bullfrog than a bird. There is more than one kind of nightingale. There are Thrush Nightingales recorded in Easter Europe and Finland. They are slightly bigger than the other, their song slower, deeper and with more contrast between pure and harsh notes. In the song of one, on the Danube delta, there is a background of the voice of fire-bellied toads and green toads. The last trace, in Romania, is backgrounded by "many green toads". Nightingales over all. Y