Sibelius’s Fifth Symphony underwent the longest, most difficult gestation of all his works. He began composing it during the late summer of 1914 but made slow progress, writing in his diary, “It is as if God had thrown down mosaic pieces from heaven’s floor and asked me to put them back as they were.”

By April 1915 he was struggling with the finale, searching in vain for the theme that would bring the great work to a fitting conclusion.  The problem was solved on the morning of 21st when inspiration finally came with the spring arrival of Finland’s national bird, the whooper swan.

Click the button to hear Stephen Johnson on Sibelius's 5th Symphony in BBC's Discovering Music series.

As part of celebrations for its 25th anniversary, Plantlife has launched a poll to find the nation’s favourite wild flower.

One in five of Britain’s wild flowers is under threat and the vote is an opportunity to highlight their plight.  As with the concurrent election for Britain’s national bird, I have had no hesitation which gets my vote. 

The bluebell has previously been voted Britain’s favourite flower, and it’s mine, too.  But tactical voters should also vote bluebell.  While you can find them in neighbouring countries, the classic bluebell wood is almost uniquely a British sight.  Between a quarter and a half of all the world’s bluebells are found in Britain and Ireland.

However, during my recently-completed two year secondment in North Norfolk, I found a significant acreage of bluebells in the Snettisham area that was contaminated through hybridisation with the rampant Spanish bluebell.  It is a problem reported from most parts of Britain.  The Spanish species is a garden favourite which readily escapes into the wild.  It is more invasive and more vigorous than our native species, and hybrids even more so.

I have found that whereas the common bluebell takes around three years to flower from seed, a Spanish bluebell plant will flower in its first year, so the rate at which the native plants can be genetically swamped is frightening.  Whatever your views on non-native plants’ “right” to grow wild, the fact is, the common bluebell is more beautiful, more scented, and more part of our cherished woodland landscape than its paler, more rugged-looking cousin.

The northern cardinal is the state bird of seven states, more than any other species:  Illinois, Indiana, Kentucky, North Carolina, Ohio, Virginia and West Virginia.  Undoubtedly its familiarity and bright colouration are part of the reason, but it is also one of the most loved songsters in North America.  Both sexes sing clear, whistled song patterns, which are repeated several times, then varied.

According to Olivier Messiaen who has featured many times on these pages, it was his teacher Paul Dukas who told him, “Listen to the birds; they are great masters.”  He took the advice, and turned it into a life-long obsession, becoming an expert on bird song in the process.  Most of Messiaen's style oiseau music is the product of careful notation of the birdsong he encountered in the field.

However, Oiseaux exotiques (1955-56) cites no fewer than 40 different birdsongs from far-flung lands, all transcribed from recordings.  The work, in a single continuous movement, may be regarded as a sort of avian fantasy, but is really a sound fantasy—an exploration of timbres and rhythms where birdsong meets ancient Karnatic and Greek rhythms. The northern cardinal has a prominent role almost from the start.

Robert Fallon is a musicologist based at Carnegie Mellon University, Pittsburgh.  He has made a study of Messiaen's transcriptions of birdsong and compared them with spectograms of the real thing.

In this superb performance of the first part of Oiseaux Exotiques, with Messiaen's one-time student Pierre Boulez conducting, and Pierre-Laurent Aimard at the piano, the first two fragments above are about 3 minutes in, and the third about twenty seconds later.

Finally, a chance to hear the bird for yourself:

I am grateful to Robert Fallon for permission to use the spectogram comparison diagram.  Rob's website contains a lot of interesting information and further examinations of other species.  Another comprehensive site for fans of Messiaen is run by Malcolm Ball at www.oliviermessiaen.org

For the past two years I have been privileged to work in one of the great wetland areas of the UK - the stunning North Norfolk Coast. During my time working with RSPB colleagues based at the Snettisham and Titchwell nature reserves I have witnessed the greatest tidal surge in living memory, marveled at spectacular flights of massed waders and geese, been excited by the appearance of rare visitors, and delighted in the commonplace.

Despite thirty years in a wide variety of conservation roles, from fundraising to international advocacy, I had never worked at the sharp end, on the ground.  So I jumped at the opportunity to be seconded to work at two of our top wetland nature reserves.

World Wetlands Day, on 2 February each year, unites all such places around the world.  It is a reminder that wetlands are among the most beautiful, vital and threatened places.  My secondment comes to an end in two months’ time and I have been reflecting on a host of memories.  I have a favourite, and it’s a simple one that could easily have passed me by on any other day:

A month later, the air over Titchwell was again the stage for a balletic battle, but this one an epic contest between two perfectly matched protagonists:

My writing room looks out on a garden, and then across fields, to a rising Yorkshire hillside streaked with the remnants of a snowscape that has all but vanished overnight.  I am vaguely getting my eye in for the RSPB’s Big Garden Birdwatch tomorrow, which has just been plugged by Radio 3.  At least 600,000 families are expected to join in, if recent years are anything to go by.

This annual celebration of the commonplace is one time when we reconnect with wildlife en masse. It is a positive that we can take out of the background trend of declining contact with nature; a note of hope that marks the end of a fortnight in which many of us have been reflecting on that sad and dangerous trend.

Positive News, the world’s first positive newspaper, can be relied upon to find inspiration in the loss of nature words from children’s vocabularies. Lucy Purdy, a London-based freelance journalist specialising in environmental and ethical issues, writes that “despite this, a new breed of writers and publications are using language, and new perspectives, to reinvigorate our relationship with the natural world.”

Lucy has written twice this week in response to our #naturewords campaign.  In New Internationalist Magazine, she surveys the current crop of nature-word champions like Dominick Tyler and Robert Macfarlane.  She concludes “At a time when systems and values crumble before us, using language to help craft a new story could be crucial. Words which stimulate and enrich. Our humiliated, hopeful humanness laid bare to the page.”

Dominick Tyler has himself been blogging about the Oxford Junior Dictionary.  Tyler’s  Landreader Project has been collecting words for landscape features, like jackstraw, zawn, clitter and logan, swash, cowbelly, hum and corrie, spinney, karst and tor.  Lucy Purdy describes it as a stirring synthesis of people and place. Already, more than 2,000 terms and words have been gathered, and in March Tyler will publish a book based on the project, titled Uncommon Ground.

In his latest blog, Tyler reflects on the list of words omitted from the OJD, which he considers as “a kind of prose-poetry supplement to be administered like a multivitamin as a defense against lexical malnutrition. Perhaps we can intone it to our children and, even better, seek out each of those things it names and show them.” 

Melissa Harrison writing in today’s Times explains why she put her name to a letter signed by 28 leading authors and thinkers: “to delist these words is to make the very things they represent begin to disappear because the process of putting words to things is how we begin a relationship with them.”

In Italy, English teacher and mother of twin girls Nadia Stevenson read about #naturewords with alarm, and wrote to author Rob Macfarlane, one of the twenty-eight who wrote to the Oxford University Press last week.  “I've been pondering all day as to what can be done. Although I'm just one small voice in the huge scheme of things, I have an immense love and esteem for the natural world of which we are part, as well as great hope for my daughters' futures.”

So two days ago Nadia set up a Facebook page Save Nature Words from Extinction.  On the page she writes:  “While we may choose to what extent technology is or isn't part of our lives, we cannot escape the fact that we ARE part of the natural world, it isn't an optional extra.” 

My version of the carol would have to depart from that of 1780 as early as day two, St. Stephen’s Day.  Saint Stephen, the first Christian martyr was said to have been betrayed by a loudly singing wren while hiding from his enemies.  Boxing Day was for centuries commemorated by Hunting the Wren, when boys set off to catch the bird and parade it around town, as described in the traditional "Wren Song". The Wren, the Wren, the king of all birds, St. Stephen's day was caught in the furze. Although he is little, his family's great, I pray you, good landlady, give us a treat. This almost certainly springs from a pre-Christian tradition, when wren feathers were given out before a voyage, to ward off disaster at sea.  In the Isle of Man Hunting the Wren persisted in some form into the 1930s, while in parts of France it continues today.

But perhaps the turtle dove should remain in the song for, whatever it may have symbolised in the past, it is now a symbol of something unattainable.  These days you’re hardly more likely to see this once common bird during the months it should be with us – April to August – than at Christmas.

It has been argued that the five gold rings once referred to pheasants, who bear a ring of white, not gold, feathers round their necks.  But the oldest known published version of 1780 illustrates the lyric with five rings and no pheasants.  The new BBC list goes for goldfinches at this point, and why not? From then on Radio 4 favours ornithological interest over any regard for a composer trying to set the lyrics: 

Six white-fronted geese a-laying
Seven mute swans a-swimming
Eight nightjars a-milking....

Come again?  Of course!  The old superstition that the night-flying, wide-gaped nightjar stole our goats’ milk from the very udder.  Clever.

Nine Andean cock-of-the-rock a-dancing
Ten manakin a-leaping
Eleven sandpipers piping....

Which just leaves my favourite – and I’ll explain why in a special Twelfth Night Re:Tweet – Twelve snipe a-drumming.

As the two organisations point out in their publicity to get young poets writing about nature, this is the time of year in which Tennyson’s phrase “Nature, red in tooth and claw” seems more than usually apt. 

The challenge is for poets aged 25 and under to write a poem about birds – anything to do with them. The YPN and RSPB suggest entrants read a 2009 article by Adam O’Riordan, about the enduring importance of birds to poets.

O’Riordan provides a succinct survey starting with The Seafarer, the Anglo-Saxon poem of spiritual longing and exile.  In it, birds become “astringent emblems of solitude” as earthly pleasures are traded for the "the gannet's noise and the voice of the curlew" while the laughter of men is replaced by "the singing gull".

In the Sixties, Ted Hughes found in birds the symbols of his own concerns, first in the shining, terrible, power of The Hawk in the Rain whose "wings hold all creation in a weightless quiet" and later going as far as to forge his own gospel story in Crow. 

In 1894 the Australian Musical Album published "The Bell Bird, composed by Reene Lees who is not yet eleven years old". It is a piano exercise, and suggests she was doing well in her piano studies as well as showing promise as a future composer.

The National Library of Australia holds two other compositions by Reene Lees, but I have been unable to find any further reference to her, or to her music.

Andrew Dawes produces of Radio 4's Tweet of the Day - World Birds, the ninety seconds of pure pleasure that many of us wake up to each morning.  It is also the source material for NATURAL LIGHT's Re:Tweet of the Day, exploring the connections between birdsong and the artists it inspires.

Andrew is also a Trustee of the Richard Jefferies Museum Trust. 

It was one of our greatest nature commentators and writers Richard Jefferies (1848 - 1887) who wrote, in what would be one of his last essays, Hours of Spring: “It is sweet on awaking in the early morn to listen to the small bird singing on the tree. No sound of voice or flute is like to the bird.” Jefferies beautifully highlights that which nature writers, and indeed lovers of the great outdoors, have revelled in through the years, an encounter with wildlife, a timeless immersion within a ‘spirit of place’.  Almost 150 years later Radio 4’s Tweet of the Day humbly aims to provide that sweet awakening, in all its forms, for its many listeners around the world.

Where do I begin? Should I choose the most flamboyant birds? The most endangered? The anthropomorphic cute and cuddly, or even the fearsome and scary? Sir David Attenborough expressed at an early stage a willingness to record for the second series in July, which was delightful. However having begun working on the series in mid-May, this meant I had a first recording deadline with Sir David in just 9 weeks.

Luckily I had at my disposal the phenomenal team involved in the first series of Tweet of the Day, winner of the prestigious Broadcasting Guild Award. So we had a producer, writer, researcher and a script editor but as yet, no birds, and no birdsong.

Tweet of the Day planning focussed in on the 120 species I thought merited inclusion. The flamboyant instantly came into mind. Birds which bring wonder and glamour to the natural world; the blue bird of paradise, emperor penguin, blue footed booby, and resplendent quetzal slipped under the wire like ornithological limbo dancers. Others waited patiently in the wings as encore understudies. The New Zealand wrybill, the only bird with a bill curved to the right, or the Galapagos Islands blood sucking vampire finch for example.   I now had the birds, but what of the birdsong?

As the world’s leading wildlife production house, the BBC’s Natural History Unit has been to every corner of the globe. For two weeks I immersed myself in this vast catalogue of natural sound. As an avid birdwatcher being paid to listen to bird song was like manna from heaven. Amazingly though some species I desired were not in the BBC’s back catalogue. Enter stage left the Macaulay Library in America, part of the Cornell Labs of Ornithology. What the BBC didn’t have, Macaulay did. The series had hatched.

We are roughly half way through the episodes. The series still excites me. It is what makes me rise from my bed at 5am most mornings to come into work. One hundred and eighty words, that’s all, roughly 60 seconds of speech. My passion is to let the birdsong breathe, to allow the listener to be transported to that country for a moment, to stop and above all listen. I hope I have achieved this. Certainly looking at the non-broadcast figures Tweet of the Day is now in the top 5 programmes being downloaded from the Radio 4 website across the UK. Worldwide, our listeners are growing steadily, with 150,000 daily subscribers to the audio server SoundCloud.

With just 120 bird species to choose from,  some listeners' favourites will of course be missing, yet I hope we have brought to the radio schedules the best of what the avian world has to offer; the spectacular, the bizarre, the songsters or in some cases those species we are about to lose forever. Above all for each species to warrant inclusion it had to satisfy an ultimate editorial driver – the voice of birds and our relationship with them. Tweet of the Day is about connection which leads to an awakening as to what is all around us. This is what drives my passion for this series.

As the airwaves crackle into life at two minutes to 6 each weekday morning, Tweet of the Day goes part of the way to proclaim that “…No sound of voice or flute is like to the bird”. I’d like to think Richard Jefferies would approve.

Andrew Dawes

Read more "countryside musings from a Northumbrian awake in the midst of a dream in the deep West Country" at Andrew Dawes' blog The Wessex Reiver

Andrew provides some further musings - from Marconi to Kate Bush - in his introduction to NATURAL LIGHT's Re:Tweet of the Day page.  Our next Re:Tweet will be the Bell Miner on 14 November.

The quetzal effect was first recognised by California-based acoustic engineer David Lubman in 1998. Nico Declercq of Ghent University was impressed when he heard the echo for himself at an acoustics conference in Cancún in 2002. After the conference, he, Lubman and other attendees took a trip to Chichén Itzá to experience the chirp of El Castillo at first hand.

Declercq's calculations show that, although there is evidence that the Mayans engineered the pyramid to produce surprising sounds, they probably couldn't have predicted exactly what they would resemble.  Declercq noticed that when visitors climbed the steps of the 24-metre high pyramid, the echoes seemed to sound just like rain falling into a bucket of water.

He suggests that this, rather than the quetzal call, could have been the aim of El Castillo's acoustic design. "It may not be a coincidence," he says, “the rain god played an important part in Mayan culture.

"Either you believe it or you don't." Declercq is now sceptical of the quetzal theory - not least because he has heard similar effects at other religious sites. At Kataragama in Sri Lanka, for example, a handclap by a staircase leading down to the Menik Ganga river produces an echo that sounds like ducks quacking.