On April 22, 1917, the first cuckoo of the year was heard from the battlefields of France. I know this, because it was reported in The Times. The piece, in the self-effacing manner of the time, is bylined “A Correspondent”. Behind the anonymity was Harry Perry Robinson, the war correspondent who subsequently covered the opening of Tutankhamun's tomb - and, as it happens, a bit of a birder.

Robinson wrote his reports from the front line, but he also sent this well-observed piece about spring above the trenches. He wrote about swallows, “single birds hurrying over the stricken battle area... looking rather out of place”. He was delighted to hear a chiffchaff - “plucky little thruster!” - belting out his disyllabic song “even while our guns thundered the overture to the Battle of Arras”. Other warblers, he added, arrived subsequently: “The cold seemed to freeze their voices.”

It touches me very deeply: the thought of this dauntless journo, writing his dispatches from hell, and, momentarily distracted, looking up and saying to himself: “Ah, that's the first willow warbler this year.” These birds, these flowers, these scraps of life held a staggering significance for those who were there - so much so that we commemorate them to this day.

John William Streets wrote a poem called A Lark Above the Trenches, a bird soaring above the horrors and singing out his heart: “I in the trenches, he lost in heaven afar,/ I dream of love, its ecstasy he sings...” This lark, the swallows crossing the battlefield, the chiffchaff singing an antiphon with the guns: they seem to me almost suffocatingly significant.

The wild world has provided a minute and momentary window of escape. Even among the greatest horror that human beings have created for themselves, there are moments of beauty, moments of hope, and they come from outside humanity. The lovely wild world co-exists with the battling humans: Robinson's calm, well-observed, nicely expressed observations have the most powerful implications. Where there is hope, there is life.

I have long loved the First World War chapter in Stephen Moss's excellent A Bird in the Bush: A Social History of Birdwatching. Moss turns up memoirs and letters in which the real and profound pleasures of the wild world gave some brief moment of respite from the battle.

“We were in the fighting for Vimy, and cut to pieces in front of Oppy Wood in April 1917. The battalion was sent back to rest, 150 instead of 800 strong. We marched back from Roclincourt to La Comte, and settled down, to my joy, on the edge of a wood where golden orioles were nesting. I had just spent a first morning watching the gorgeous cock, when the colonel announced that we had to return at once to the line.” This was Charles Raven, later a Cambridge don and author of books on the history of ornithology.

Birders tend to love lists; a day list and a garden list and a train list are commonplaces of the birding life. One writer from the First World War collected a bird list from artillery duels, birds seen while the shells were actually flying: house sparrow, swallow, house martin, chaffinch, yellowhammer, skylark, willow wren (meaning willow warbler), magpie, kestrel, and wood pigeon. Humans, it seems, can create a first-class hell, but they can't chase out all the angels.

I was briefly in St Andrews this week, but it was nothing to do with golf, thank God. While most of my time was spent discussing matters of great importance with scientists, researching a piece for next week's paper, I did manage half-an-hour's distant but delightful birding.

Why do people mess about hitting a little ball in this town when just a short walk away from the links - a good walk substantially improved - you find the not inaptly named Eden Estuary. It is a stunning landscape, but a landscape is really just the starting point.

People write an awful lot of guff about nice landscape: but you can't begin to understand its meaning until you have come to terms with the ambient birds.

This was Scotland, not England, and it was jumping with Scottish birds. This made the place as different as if the birds had all been wearing kilts. I spend a lot of time looking at estuaries in England - it's my natural habitat, after all - and to look out at an estuary and see a significantly different avifauna was thrillingly disconcerting.

I was working at extreme range, but still managed half-decent views of eiders, Britain's biggest and fastest-flying duck. The drakes are startlingly black and white. Both sexes have an elaborate Roman nose, and they converse to each other in kinds of “ooh”. An eider convention sounds like a crowd of people doing impersonations of Frankie Howerd looking through a keyhole.

There were also red-breasted merganser, birds I seldom see in England. They have serrated beaks for grasping fish, and salmon and trout are their favourites. These birds explained the nature of the place, the Scottishness, the unEnglishness of it. You can't begin to understand any place until you have been introduced to its birds.

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