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Your support makes all the difference."There was magic abroad in the air,/There were angels dining at the Ritz,/And a nightingale sang in Berkeley Square."
And it could just happen again. A nightingale has been spotted in west London, the closest one has got to Berkeley Square in 20 years. The sighting was welcomed by ornithologists as good news for wildlife in urban areas.
The nightingale, whose distinctive flute-like song is reckoned by many to be the most melodic in the bird world, was spotted just six miles from the city centre, in Barnes.
The key to its return to the capital has been the growth of dense thickets of hawthorn and blackthorn - an ideal nesting habitat for the bird - at the London Wetland Centre, run by the Wildfowl and Wetlands Trust (WWT).
"The nightingale is one of those birds that is very uplifting when you hear or see it," said Dr Richard Bullock, biodiversity officer at the Wetland Centre. "But the bird in Berkeley Square seems to have evaporated into the distant past. With the growth of urban conurbations we have lost the habitat which such birds enjoyed."
Describing the Wetland Centre as "an oasis of wildlife biodiversity", Dr Bullock said it "probably drew the nightingale in to see what was on offer. In future years this may encourage them to breed. You only need two or three birds to drop in for that to happen."
Despite the music hall song, written by Eric Maschwitz and Manning Sherwin for the 1940 review New Faces, it is unlikely nightingales ever found a habitat to their liking in Berkeley Square. But in former times they could be found in central London, having been recorded in verse by Keats, who described how the bird "singest of summer in full-throated ease". Nesting was recorded in Hyde Park and Regent's Park up to the mid 19th century, and Dickens reported hearing birds from the Harrow Road in north-west London.
As the city expanded, the nightingale gradually retreated to the rural fringe, though nesting was recorded on Wimbledon Common up to 1950. The total number of singing males reported in Epping Forest - some 22 miles from central London - dropped to a low of 18 in 1990.
The nightingale has been accompanied by an influx of other rare birds to Barnes and other WWT sites in Britain. This is in direct contrast to the fate of sparrows, whose numbers have plummeted in urban areas in the past 15 years.
The London Wetland Centre has recently seen the arrival of two white-spotted blue-throats, a night heron, a red-backed shrike and a ring ouzel, all species that have never previously been recorded at the centre and are a long way from their normal homes.
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