A Song in the Night: Nightingales at Castle Wild Camp

Earlier this month, something magical happened at Castle Wild Camp, our first nightingale was recorded.

Nightingales are one of Britain’s most celebrated songbirds, famous for their rich, powerful song that can stop you in your tracks. They sing with a mix of whistles, trills, and gurgles that seem impossibly complex for one small bird. But sadly, their numbers have plummeted by over 90% in the last fifty years. In Norfolk, they are now rare visitors, their haunting night chorus largely gone from the countryside.

Why nightingales have vanished

Nightingales thrive in tangled, scrubby habitats - places with dense thickets of hawthorn, blackthorn, bramble, and young woodland where they can hide, nest, and feed on insects. Modern agricultural landscapes, with their neat field edges and open hedgerows, simply don’t offer enough of this kind of cover. Loss of habitat, along with pressures from climate change, has driven them to a few strongholds in the southeast of England.

What we’re doing to bring them back

Here at Castle Wild Camp, our rewilding work is all about making space for nature to recover. That means letting the land grow a little wilder:

• Encouraging scrub growth - We’re allowing bramble patches, blackthorn thickets, and young trees to expand in certain areas, creating the kind of dense cover nightingales need.

• Leaving messy edges - Instead of trimming everything back, we leave large untidy margins where insects thrive, giving birds a rich food supply.

• Restoring our ponds - We've restored several of our ponds and they now provide water, abundant insect life and dense surrounding habitat.

• Minimising disturbance — We’ve kept much of the site quiet (our camping glades and facilities cover less that 1% of the total site!!), particularly in the spring, so that birds can establish territories without too much human activity.

  
  

Looking ahead

One nightingale doesn’t make a breeding population, but it gives us hope. It tells us that the habitat here is becoming suitable enough for these long-distance migrants to at least stop by and sing. With time, and by continuing to build a mosaic of scrub, woodland, and grassland, we hope that one day our site will be home to nightingales again, not just passing visitors.

And perhaps, in the years to come, our summer nights will once more be filled with their extraordinary song.