There’s no place like May. There’s nowhere I’d rather be than May. May is the very peak of Mount 2008, and on this lofty summit, you can see for years. The world is spread out before you in endless generations. May time and a world gone mad for love, love that conquers all, the love that moves the sun and other stars.

You can hear love, and its comely sister lust, echoing from every bush and branch. You can see it in the skies above you, in the whizzing, screaming swifts. You must duck as you enter outbuildings, for swallows crazed with desire will come barrelling out, while beneath the eaves of houses, the house martins make homes of their own.

Above all, May is a celebration of song. To appreciate that, you must start paying attention right at the beginning of the year: listening as the robin, the soloist of the winter, is joined on fine mornings by others. One by one, the chorus swells: more and more join in.

Then the year turns, the migrants begin to arrive; by late March the birds who winter in southern Europe are back with us; by mid-April, the long-distance travellers are arriving in numbers. By the time May is here, they are all in full voice, and the air throbs with passion.

Sex! Territory! Seeing off rivals, winning a mate: so many birds do these vital things by singing their guts out. For a human, learning a song or two is the beginning of a completely new way of appreciating life and understanding it. Why do birds sing? Because they must.

Song is the way songbirds make more songbirds: the best singers hold the best territories, win the best females, and therefore raise the most, and the best young. The genes of the survivors are the genes of the champion singers. Life is about making more life – the meaning of life being nothing less than life itself – and this grand and bracing truth is expressed in May in the medium of song.

That’s why they sing: but why do they do it so well? Do we bring all this down to reductionist science and genes? Or do we wonder if birds love music for its own sake: if the elaborations, if the beauty of the song is something that pleases the birds themselves?

How does it feel to be a nightingale in full voice? How does a female respond in her heart, in her essential guts, when a male is singing for her? There is evidence that the thrills and trills affect the very chemical state of her brain. Keats guessed as much: he said that the song of nightingale made him feel as though of hemlock he had drunk.

If the nightingale is the best, there are times when his song seems almost to much: too rich, too intense, too loud, so passionate it is almost uncomfortable: sweet whistles that quiver with intensity, thrumming jug-jug sounds that you’d think would make the bird burst with the effort, melodic episodes, and harsh, challenging modernist interludes.

Birdsong is at its best at dawn of course, and that in May is absurdly early. Can a sane human really get up at a three? But I try and do that once every May. The nightingale is always there before me, because for a nightingale, singing is 24-hour job. And as the day begins, bird after bird joins in.

But May is not just for mad specialist jaunts. May shouts itself hoarse, everywhere there is the faintest scrap of green, in cities and forests, and it affects us all, even those not even consciously aware that there is singing going on. But tune in, just tune in: and the world is instantly more beautiful than it was before. May: it’s the place to be.

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