A slender little bird with a wonderful sonorous clean voice has long and long been loved by lovers of sonorous trills. Not everyone wakes up with the first cocks. Someone was lucky to meet the morning to the nightingale's peppy song. The lucky ones are the smokers. They have their own "family" vocalist. And, although such a biological species does not exist, numerous fans are sure that the Kursk nightingale is different from other tribesmen.
And there’s a whistler, a red-necked, a bluethroat. And they all belong to the nightingale family. The vocal data of the feathered artists was glorified in their works by poets of past eras. In Homer's Odyssey, one of the heroines of the myth magically turns into just such a feathered one.
Nightingale - songbird: description
Closer to the hero of this exposition was the great Russian writer Nikolai Nekrasov. In his poem dedicated to the universal favorite, he noted that "our Kursk nightingale is in price ...".
Glorified him, of course, primarily singing. After all, if you look from the side, then the appearance of this winged phenomenon is completely unremarkable. Many have heard, but they have seen less and know who the nightingale is - a bird whose description you will read, but you will not recognize it when you meet it. The sprout is small, only seventeen centimeters, the legs are long, the eyes are dark, the color is brown, only the tail with a redhead.
Habitat
The bird is housed in the eastern subspecies, almost throughout the European part of our vast homeland, to the Caucasus and Crimea, to Altai and the Yenisei. It can be met in East Germany and Poland, and it does not fly past the Baltic. And there is also a western representative living in Ukraine, in southern and central Europe, and Asia Minor. Persian and African subspecies nest in Kazakhstan and the Caucasus. In general, he lives almost everywhere, does not bother, he is friends with sparrows, since he belongs to this detachment. And families they have flytrap and blackbird.
Nutrition
The nightingale is a bird, the description of which we have practically outlined, is not whimsical in food. Spiders, various insects and berries are included in the regular menu for breakfast, lunch and dinner. Nest arranges low, in thickets of grass or in the roots of bushes.
Breeding
It drags literally everything for its home: dry foliage, stems, straws. If you are lucky to pick up shreds of wool somewhere, the bottom in the nest will be soft and warm. In this cozy apartment the offspring of feathered singers is born. Only the female hatches eggs.
They are a little more than twenty millimeters long, color perfectly blend with dried leaves. So, for the thirteen days that are needed to hatch the chicks, it is unlikely that someone accidentally sees them and can do harm. Moreover, all this period the future mother and her offspring are reliably guarded and fed, like a real man, the head of a friendly family.
Wintering
The nightingale is a migratory bird, so it’s not to go somewhere to winter, but to Africa. He also likes to warm fragile bones in the sun. He doesn’t forget, however, to return in time to sing spring and warm. This happens in early May, when the weather is already settled, and the sun warms in summer. In the southern regions, their early return is noted, back in April.
Singing
Some poets claim that winged vocalists sing only at night. But this is completely untrue. Trills can be heard at other times of the day, but only performed by males. That is how they show attention to their girlfriends, look after them. Probably, the knights, having once spied on the birds, began to perform serenades under the windows of their beloved.
Just in singing in the first place the Russians always have the famous Kursk nightingale. For connoisseurs and connoisseurs of their vocal art has become a whole science. Solo is distinguished by a large number of so-called "tribes", in an approximate translation into human language - verses. These features are reflected in winged phrases. And who, do you think, is “throwing the knee”? Folk talents learn the nightingale manner of performance and try to imitate it, compete with each other in skill, like the very birds.
All sorts of "songs"
Ivan Sergeyevich Turgenev understood the habits of feathered chorists. He even detailed ten verses in detail in his letter to a friend-hunter. Bullet-bullets, fang-fangs, captivity-captivity, hoo-hoo-hoo ... Here and yulina boredom, and peal, Lesha pipe and cuckoo flight. Connoisseurs attribute as singers up to twenty-four tribes, especially noting their peculiar construction in each locality. Kursk sang “verses” more than others, for which they always enjoyed increased attention, even during major fairs several centuries ago.
They came here from all over Russia, bought up nightingales. In the mid-nineteenth century, 150 rubles was a rather big sum. That is how much, if not more, was paid for local birds. For this money, you could then buy a couple of horses, and even add a couple of cows to the farmyard. As indicated in the statement for 1836, locals sold 420 birds that year at the Root Fair.
In those days, catching the song of the land of Kursk was profitable. No wonder they said that they "sing on arshin." Happy owners were ready to lay out tidy sums, so that later they would daily be touched and admired by sonorous trills. Considerable profit was also brought by the training of small birds in vocal art. The chicks were specially placed next to the adult males so that the youth would listen and repeat the knee of the "professionals." The Kursk melody could be heard in St. Petersburg, because the Imperial Court also had a weakness for such a sound.
The nightingale, a bird whose singing is distributed at dawn and sunset from spring to autumn, has not lost its popularity today. Now at home, unlike parrots and kenars, these birds do not keep. Only enthusiastic ornithologists. But in Kursk , a museum opened several years ago, which is dedicated to the life and phenomenon of feathered singers. More than 500 exhibits, historical data, literary works, sayings and signs. It contains everything that the Kursk nightingale can tell about itself, photographs and clay figurines of a feathered one from local craftsmen are of constant interest and daily attract hundreds of visitors, young and old, to the museum.
Competitions of vocalists, festivals of bard songs, bearing the name of a proud bird, are held in the region and beyond. And from Kursk to the white stone one can be reached by the nightingale train.
Kursk nightingale
This sonorous nickname was received by famous stage voices: in Tsarist Russia - singer Nadezhda Plevitskaya, in the forties of the last century - tenor Ivan Surzhikov, now they call the favorite of the public, People's Artist of the Russian Federation Lev Leshchenko.
Remarkable is the fact that with all the veneration and pride of the local "feathered stars", they are not on the arms of the Kursk region . But there are three flying partridges. This is how they ignored the main symbol of the region.
Unlike the end of the nineteenth century, when poultry farming in the Kursk province threatened the "singers" with extinction, in our time there is no need to add them to the Red Book. Only in the region there are about two thousand pairs. But this does not mean that they do not need protection, like all living things around us. It is pleasant to meet and see off the day to a pure singing that gives a sense of peace and causes a smile.
Conclusion
We hope you understand what a nightingale is - a bird, the description of which we told you. Now you can share your knowledge with loved ones.