My search for the nightingale's song

Castor Hanglands, Cambridgeshire I listen for 30 minutes, imagining this delicate thing inhaling, exhaling, creating that sound

It's odd going somewhere to listen. Usually you go somewhere to look. I'd never knowingly heard a nightingale. The word is so resonant. It's maybe 1,000 years old, that name: nihtgale, "night songstress" - but now they know it's the male that sings so distinctively by dark, to defend and attract. I'd always thought the name elegantly, evocatively, benignly crepuscular. Probably I'd heard it passively. But I'd never gone somewhere to find it.

Knowing little of birds, I had to be told where and when to listen. "Dusk and into dark, and you'll hear the nightingales. You'll know it because nothing else will be singing."