More about Chogstable the Nightingale

SOME GOOGLING into the subject, has revealed that Chogstable, my nightingale, is probably a boy. And that there might well be two or three of him. Or else he has severe insomnia, because he's frequently to be heard singing at all times throughout the day. Nightingale is said to mean "songstress of the night". But the two assumptions ~ that it is the female who sings and at night are wrong. It is, so I read, the male nightingale who does most of the singing. In the early hours of course his song becomes far more distinctive for lack of warbling, tweetling competition. But nightingales are to be heard chirruping away at all and any times during the 24 hours.

If you ever go on holiday to Togo or Chad and think you hear Chogstable twittering his head off at 4:30am ~ you're not going crazy. It might actually be Chogstable himself! Nightingales winter in Western and Central Africa, returning here by mid-April (so how come I first spotted Chogstable in January? Looking like a small thrush without the speckles (ie just like a nightingale), hanging out around dense vegetation ie behaving just like a nightingale. Every night I spotted him around the same tree he sings in today.) How could Chogstable be here, when he ought to have been having a chirp in some mango-grove in Gabon?

The little nightingales are said to cross the Sahara Desert in one fell swoop (so to speak) sleeping as they fly (which some birds can do), thrumming their tiny wings nonstop. On they flutter, across the Straits of Gibraltar or wider Mediterranean Sea, finally touching down for a long-overdue roost in Southern Spain or Italy.

May is said to be the best month to hear nightingale song, when the birds are breeding. In June, they are tending their nests of babies as couples. By July they take to the skies once more, thrum-thrum-thrumming away, off to their second homes and luxury gîtes along the Gold Coast, the Côte d'Ivoire or the Congo or Volta rivers...

Actually having read their supposed migration-timetable, which implies they ping too and from Africa not once a year, but twice. I'm confused. If anyone has better information, please let me know...

LINKS:
Wikipedia nightingale
Wikipedia nachtigall
Springerlink: First arrival dates of nightingale to Central Croatia

Any good videos (if I can find 'em) und Deutsche Übersetzung kommen später/coming later.

SPEAKING OF SINGERS
This is pretty remarkable:
ROSLYN KIND: CAN YOU READ MY MIND
What do you think of her voice? Whose does her singing remind you of?



An old clip: