Birds learned how to create melody long before mankind did. And no other animal ever got there: elephants merely trumpet their one-note vuvuzelas; whales boom beneath the ocean waves, but nothing sings like the birds.

Composers through the ages have recognised this, although they tended in the past to idealise birdsong and make it fit the tonal language with which they were comfortable. Mozart kept a caged starling whose tweet was the melody of his Piano Concerto No 17, though he admitted the pet persistently sharpened one of the notes.

A flute’s trill became the cliché warble to the baroque. In the twentieth century, recording technology enabled the ear to focus more closely on what the bird was actually singing. Ottorino Respighi, in wonder, called for an actual recording of a nightingale to be played in the third movement of his orchestral tone poem, Pines of Rome, but Olivier Messiaen heard in his own bird recordings a modernist aesthetic, which he transformed into volumes of keyboard music and gigantic orchestral scores.

“I am an ornithologist by passion and reason,” said Messiaen. “I discovered that birds had done everything – modes, neumes, rhythmics, melodies and even collective improvisation in the dawn chorus.”