Every year, beginning in April, a new sound can be heard in Berlin’s various green spaces and parks: a series of trills, whoops and whistles followed by some of the animal kingdom’s most beautiful and complicated music. It is the truest sign of spring: the song of the nightingale.
With equal parts authority and awe she describes how a male nightingale composes his song from the roughly 180 different notes
But it isn’t just the nightingale. Spring means emerging birdlife of all kinds – and, for bookish Berliners, a great excuse to explore the burgeoning world of bird-based nonfiction literature. In recent years, the anglosphere has turned with great interest towards our feathered friends.
The rediscovery of older works like J. A. Baker’s The Peregrine (1967) and the massive success of H is for Hawk, Helen Macdonald’s 2014 lyrical memoir of grief and goshawk-handling, have established birdlife at the heart of the booming genre of personal nature writing – a genre that foregrounds individual experience over scientific explanation. Charlie Gilmour’s sensitive Featherhood: A Memoir of Two Fathers and a Magpie, published to acclaim last year, shows the form is still going strong.
Here in Germany, too, birdy literature has taken off. Some of the finest instalments have come within local publisher Matthes & Seitz’s collection of animal and plant portraits. The series – edited by Berlin-based star author and book designer Judith Schalansky – effortlessly combines biology, cultural history and personal reflection in colourful and charmingly- illustrated little volumes. Cord Riechelmann’s 2013 Krähen (“Crows”) and Karin Schneider’s 2021 Tauben (“Pigeons”), both by local writers, offer fascinating insight into the private and public lives of two ubiquitous Berlin birds.
It is the truest sign of spring: the song of the nightingale.
At the other end of Berlin’s ornithological spectrum stands the nightingale, which provides the subject for another two fine recent releases. Silke Kipper’s good-humoured Die Nachtigall (“The Nightingale”), published last April, provides an accessible introduction to the species, from their migratory habits through their surprisingly complicated love lives (very Berlin-appropriate) to their famous song, which inspired poets like Goethe and Keats as well as composers from Schubert to Britten and beyond. Kipper’s team spent decades recording and studying the nightingales in Treptower Park; it is with equal parts authority and awe that she describes how a male nightingale composes his song from the roughly 180 different notes in his repertoire.
Meanwhile, the Berlin Urban Nature Box: Nightingale – available in German from the Museum für Naturkunde – offers a rare synthesis of theory and practice. This elegant book-box includes a slim booklet about Berliner Nachtigallen, a map of nightingale locations developed through a citizen science initiative, and a notebook for making observations.
Who knows: it might just be the start of your own Berlin bird book.
