When Peter started off with words about trees, and then moved on to telling how he was taklking to "a native elder" I got concerned for a moment.

Prince Charles is supposed to talk to his trees, and his ancestor George III once mistook a tree in Windsor Great Park for the King of Prussia (not a wholly unrereasonable thing to do). But elders are notoriously spooky trees.

I've always understood that birds sing for very practical reasons. Most of the time they are saying "push off, you lot, this is my patch of wood", and sometimes they are singing "I'm in the mood for love."

Not that different from the rest of us really.

But the dawn chorus in a wood is really something. "We've made it through the dark", and all the songs overlapping and echoing off each other.

The nearest you get to that with humans is sometimes when you wander through a festival, late at night, and hear different types of music and singing coming at you from all the different directions, fiddles and banjos and squeezeboxes. And every now and again someone bellows "Shut up you lot, we're trying to get some sleep", and the dogs start barking and the babies start crying... The night chorus.