Can anyone help me identify a night-singing bird--not a nightingale? (1 Viewer)

Around Dadia and the Prespa Lakes in northern Greece this past spring, we kept hearing a small bird that sang at night but not (usually) in the daytime.
It wasn't a nightingale--we heard lots of those and know the song well.

This bird has a light, silvery voice that carries quite far. It sings in series of four notes, dropping down the scale:
Ta, ta, ta, ta
Ta, ta, ta, ta,
Ta, ta, ta, ta
Ta, ta, ta, ta and then ends with another series of notes and a phrase that sounds like "birdy, birdy, birdy."

It's hard to describe birdsong--I'd know it at once if I heard it.
Because we almost always heard it at night, we couldn't work out what t was. Then one morning we heard it and saw the bird singing--it looked like a cirl bunting from behind, but it couldn't have been--cirl buntings just do a trill. We also saw a rock bunting in the area. I found some clips of rock buntings singing and while they do have a silvery light voice, the song recorded wasn't the song I heard. Do rock buntings sing at night?

If it can't be a cirl bunting or a rock bunting, does anyone have any idea what it might be? Except for night and early morning (the latter only at Prespa) we never heard the song during the day.

Hm. Have you considered Woodlark?

http://www.xeno-canto.org/species/Lullula-arborea

Black Redstart regularly sings here - not all night long but certainly in the hours of darkness...

Purple Heron said:

.... night but not (usually) in the daytime.
It wasn't a nightingale--we heard lots of those and know the song well.

This bird has a light, silvery voice that carries quite far. It sings in series of four notes, dropping down the scale:
Ta, ta, ta, ta
Ta, ta, ta, ta,
Ta, ta, ta, ta
Ta, ta, ta, ta and then ends with another series of notes and a phrase that sounds like "birdy, birdy, birdy."

Click to expand...

Agree with Woodlark - all fits :t:

Thanks, guys, but woodlark isn't it (nice song, though, and xeno-canto is a great site) . Not a black redstart, either--they're winter birds here.