magic abroad in the air

And what better place to begin than with introductions all around? Meet our blog’s patron bird, the nightingale. A small songbird of the flycatcher group (family Muscicapidae), the nightingale might well have faded into the obscurity of its cousins the wheat-ears, the silverbirds and chats without one singular talent: its song. (Did you know that nightingales migrate in a non-stop journey from northern Europe to wintering grounds in sub-Saharan Africa—a flight of 38 million times its own length? Few of us do. In the shadow of the peregrine, this is the curse of all birds: flying will not make them famous.)

To Hans Christian Andersen, the nightingale’s song was joyful and light as a mother’s kiss; to Keats, mourning his brother’s death at age 19, it was a “plaintive” dirge, a “requiem”. But however it may feel to you, the nightingale’s song is agreed to be the most exquisite the class Aves has to offer. Birds magazine, whose editors must have heard a tweet or two in their time, was moved to conclude in 1898, “O doubt those who never hear the song of the Nightingale are denied a special privilege.” Indeed, the name that has followed them for over a millennium, direct from the Anglo-Saxon, means “night singer”—the ‘”gale” still living among us in another form as our word “yell”.

In Eric Maschwitz and Manning Sherwin’s 1940 song “A Nightingale Sang in Berkeley Square” (since recorded by Vera Lynn, Nat King Cole and a dozen others paled by comparison to the definitive Bobby Darin version), two lovers’ first meeting transforms the world to magic. Angels dining at the Ritz. Streets paved with stars. And when he turned and smiled at her… cue that nightingale.

To know the magic, we must remember that the nightingale has not been a London dweller since shortly after Dickens reported hearing them in the Harrow Road. Increased urbanization sent them winging to quieter habitat. But they don’t shun cities entirely. In fact, nightingales are observed in cities throughout Europe. Far from being silenced by the roar of the crowd, the nightingale simply fills its lungs and sings even louder, to send its voice to any other nightingales, or lovers, who might be listening. The nightingale thrives among us, and prospers in our centers of commerce, and makes sure to sing its song a little louder.

So the nightingale is our perfect patron here, where we’ll celebrate the traces of nature that mark our steps through a city. For us, the urbanized, for you and me and Bobby Darin, life still holds magic. We don’t see visions, and don’t see the face of God: it’s the nightingale we see, the voice of the wild, calling through the city to find us. The nightingale is the magic, this real and living thing of feathers and of flaws. The world around us holds all the magic we know, or ever need. It’s being reminded of that—by flowers breaking through the sidewalk, by the dancing rainbow on a pigeon’s wing, by the songbird’s echo in the tremor of a kiss—that exalts us beyond the city, where our own noise can drown us.

(And in 2004, a solitary nightingale was spotted by ornithologists in western London.)