The nightingale has a sweet song, and loves to sing. It sings to relieve the tedium as it sits on its nest through the night. At dawn it sings so enthusiastically that it almost dies. Sometimes nightingales compete with each other with their songs, and the one that loses the competition often dies.

The Aberdeen Bestiary likens the nightingale to a poor mother: "The poor but modest mother, her arm dragging the millstone around, that her children may not lack bread, imitates the nightingale, easing the misery of her poverty with a night-time song, and although she cannot imitate the sweetness of the bird, she matches it in her devotion to duty."

Eating the flesh of a nightingale will keep a person awake.

Hildegard von Bingen says: "One whose eyes are clouded should seize a nightingale before sunrise. He should take its bile, pour it out, and add to this one drop of dew which he finds on clean grass. Then, when he goes to bed, he should smear this on his eyelids and eyelashes, and also around his eyes. If he should touch the inside of his eyes a bit, it will not harm him. It will wondrously take the cloudiness from his eyes, just as foam is purged and done away with by the heat of fire in the summer." (Throop translation)