I wonder if you you all get the same feelings of anticipation that I experience when May day comes along? Up here in the Scottish highlands it's as though someone has thrown a switch, encouraging the bird life to suddenly, and enthusiastically, give voice.

A couple of days ago I was sitting at the edge of the moor, a small outcrop of rock softening the cold blow of the early morning wind. From the pock marked flatness below me came what I can only describe as a cacaphony of bird sound, a tumultous celebration of spring.

All my favourites were out, and obviously in fine fettle.

Who can fail to be moved by the bubbling crescendo of the whaup, or curlew. There must be hundreds of them around this spot, and they were all making music as though delighted to feel some hint of warmth from the early sun.

I listened to the thin call, rising slowly and then becoming faster until the great climax to the song: a bubbling sound, a liquid trill that is loved by outdoors folk everywhere.

Combine that particular music with the plaintively shrill pee-wit of the lapwing, another song that has exiles virtually moved to tears. Here is the song of the moors, the song of wide open skies.

Watch its mad acrobatics, its crazy abandoned flight, tumbling to earth as though about to crash land, only to swerve at the last possible moment, and soar upwards again, twisting and tilting its wings as though careering through some invisible obstacle course. And all the time squeaking and trumpeting in that uncanny. characteristic call.

Add the high pitched piping of the oystercatcher, the Servants of Saint Bride, and you get a medlay of wader song fit to lift the heart, and my heart was well and truly lifted by the sound of it all.

As I wandered home for breakfast a robin chortled out its sweet song in the woods, and a wren scolded me for making such a noise. I was heading for a day at the computer but there was a skylark in the field and the sound of it cheered me like no other sound can.