Common nightingale

Nightingales eat bugs.

They look on the ground under bushes. They find beetles, ants, worms and spiders. In late summer they eat berries too.

Nightingales mostly eat insects and other small creatures, such as beetles, ants, flies, worms and spiders, and they eat insect larvae too. They find most of their food on the ground, under the cover of thick bushes.

In late summer and fall they add berries and seeds to their meals. Singing all night uses lots of energy, so a male that sings at night has to spend part of the day searching for food.

The diet is mainly invertebrates: beetles, ants, flies, worms, spiders and insect larvae, mostly taken on the ground (Animal Diversity Web, University of Michigan; Woodland Trust). In late summer and autumn the birds also eat berries and seeds (IUCN, citing Collar and Christie 2015).

Food and song are linked. Animal Diversity Web reports that singing at night is costly: males lose weight on nights they sing, so they must spend time foraging during the day to build up reserves. That leaves less time for singing and makes them more likely to be seen by predators.

Male nightingales sing at night to find a mate.

After a male finds a mate, he sings at dawn and dusk instead. He also sings to tell other males to stay away.

The nightingale is well known for singing at night. A male without a mate sings through the dark to attract a female, sometimes for up to half the night. Once he has a mate, he stops singing at night and sings mostly at dawn and dusk.

A male can sing around 180 to 260 different song variations, and older males know more songs than young ones. Males also sing to warn other males away from their patch.

According to the BTO, males sing at night until they pair, after which their song is limited to dusk and dawn. Animal Diversity Web reports a repertoire of roughly 180 to 260 song variations, about 53 percent larger in older males, which also tend to hold larger territories and attract mates more successfully; why repertoires grow so much with age is not yet known.

Songs fall into whistle songs, used in territory defense and to attract females, and non-whistle songs; paired males sing fewer whistle songs. Singing is costly, and some researchers think females may choose the males in the best condition by their song. Animal Diversity Web reports that up to 49 percent of males may not find a mate.

There are still many nightingales in the world.

But in some places, like Britain, there are fewer than before. People help by looking after the thick bushes where nightingales nest.

Around the world, nightingales are not in danger: the IUCN lists them as Least Concern, with tens of millions of adult birds. But in some places they are disappearing. In Britain there were about 5,550 males in 2012, and the area where they breed there shrank by more than 40 percent between the late 1960s and 2011.

Nightingales need thick, messy bushes. Changes in farming, tidy gardens and deer that nibble away low plants all take away their nesting places. Cutting woods in a careful rotation, called coppicing, and keeping deer numbers down can help.

The IUCN's 2024 global assessment lists Luscinia megarhynchos as Least Concern, with a very preliminary estimate of 37.1 to 55.8 million mature individuals and a stable trend, because the European population, about 55 percent of the range, has been stable over three generations.

Regional declines are real, though. The IUCN links losses in the west of the range since the 1950s to modern farming and the 'tidying' of gardens and woodland, and to lost streamside nesting habitat in Spain. In Britain, where the species is on the Red List of Birds of Conservation Concern, the BTO reports a 42.6 percent contraction of the breeding range between the 1968–72 and 2008–11 bird atlases and strong evidence that deer browsing harms nightingales; coppicing and deer control help. Conditions on the African wintering grounds are also likely to matter.