Ernst Karl Reich (1871 – 7 September 1944,

Bremen Bremen (Low German also: ''Breem'' or ''Bräm''), officially the City Municipality of Bremen (german: Stadtgemeinde Bremen, ), is the capital of the German state Free Hanseatic City of Bremen (''Freie Hansestadt Bremen''), a two-city-state consis ...

) was a German businessman and aviculturist who kept nightingales and canaries at his aviary in

. Along with Hans Duncker, he carried out breeding experiments on canaries. The first commercial

gramophone A phonograph, in its later forms also called a gramophone (as a trademark since 1887, as a generic name in the UK since 1910) or since the 1940s called a record player, or more recently a turntable, is a device for the mechanical and analogu ...

records of bird songs included the songs of nightingales from his aviary. He had a nightingale sing into the horn of the recording equipment. Reich was a businessman in

and ran a hardware store. He lived on Am Wall. Along with Karl Gustav Hartwig and Carl Röben, he was a founding member of the "Gesellschaft zum Schutze der heimischen Vögel" () on 17 March 1914. It later became the Bremer Naturschutzgesellschaft (BNG, ). Reich made young canaries listen to and learn nightingale songs. One of his canaries bred in 1911 had a very deep voice, and he was able to breed it and produce a strain of canaries that could sing nightingale songs. In 1908, the oldest commercially issued gramophone record of a bird song was made, with recordings of Reich's captive nightingales. The

HMV Sunrise Records and Entertainment, trading as HMV (for His Master's Voice), is a British music and entertainment retailer, currently operating exclusively in the United Kingdom. The first HMV-branded store was opened by the Gramophone Company ...

catalogue for it is, in part, "G.C.9439. Made by a captive nightingale. For the first time in the history of the Talking Machine industry, a genuine record has been obtained of a bird. The Nightingale in question is the property of Herr Carl Reich, of Berlin..." The MoonArk includes a recording of nightingale song by Karl Reich.

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