On a still spring evening we came to the lakeside to fulfil a winter promise. For a while, we sat in a hide and watched hundreds of gulls swooping low over the water. It was a largely silent spectacle, for most of the gulls opened their mouths only to catch insects emerging for their maiden flights.
When dusk became dark, we opened the door and went to an area of thick bushes and tiny clearings. Our friend – a professional singer – had never knowingly heard a nightingale. He might have expected Chopin with a beak: lyrical cascades and liquid melodies that give its relative, the blackcap, the name "northern nightingale". But this nightingale was something else. It broke the silence with its trademark introduction – a drawn-out chord of flats and sharps that resolved in a salvo of choppy throat-wrenching sounds that poet John Clare transcribed as a prosaic "jug-jug-jug". And then it stopped.
It delivered its next six-second song, a macaw-like whoop segueing into whistles and an explosion of notes. Our friend's jaw dropped. The volume was extraordinary, but more remarkable still was the quality of the notes. They had a richness and resonance as if they were electronically amplified. No wonder writers stretching back to the Roman Pliny the Elder exalted: here was a bird wired for sound. The next burst threw together another fusion of styles, shifting between tunes and percussion without breaking.
For a full quarter of an hour, we stood and marvelled, but we never once saw the singer. Eventually, it slipped deeper into the undergrowth towards the lake, and three other nightingales nearby sounded louder in our ears. It was time to make our way back. Though we were some distance from the lakes, far from the nightingales, a distinctive sound still broke the night air – "jug-jug-jug".