Nightingale folklore runs deep in European culture, in both high literature and unwritten, long forgotten, stories.

It appears in countless plays, artistic impressions, poems and pieces of music.

For the nightingale has been used as a symbol of love, spiritual essence, and melancholy since ancient Greece, and probably long before.

It has acquired this status not by its looks or familiarity, but by its near mythical song.

In appearance it is more or less a robin without the redbreast. It is a uniform warm brown, with a paler belly, although it does have a tail with a distinctive chestnut-red coloration.

(Image: Amy Lewis)

It is often the tail that draws the eye as the bird flits into the recess of a deep dark bush.

Small woodland birds are rather skulking and are more easily heard than seen.

This is certainly the case with nightingales, as they tend to sing from the cover of dense thorny scrub.

In fact, this is the nightingale’s preferred habitat, and the more tangled the dense thickets in an overgrown coppiced woodland, the better.

Although they will nest on heaths and commons with patches of thick scrub.

In Norfolk we are at the northern limit of the bird’s geographical range, with the species being most numerous in the western Mediterranean.

It winters in sub-Saharan Africa arriving back in the UK during early May.

A 1982 survey of nightingale across Norfolk gave its population, based on singing males, at approximately 325 pairs.

Estimates currently put numbers well below one hundred pairs, with most of these being concentrated in the south-west of the county.

Despite it being long ago, I clearly recall the first time I heard a........

© Norwich Evening News