Peter Ross: Original tweeters offer message of hope YESTERDAY while driving on the drizzly M876, I heard the doleful boom of a bittern. Also, jackdaws, nightjars and jays, kittiwakes, corncrakes, ospreys. As I passed the exit for Denny, kestrels; crossing the Clackmannanshire Bridge, guillemots. Of course, this motorway corridor of the Forth Valley does not have as splendid a variety of bird life as all this suggests. I was listening, in fact, to a CD - British Bird Sounds, compiled by the British Library and featuring 175 commonly heard species of indigenous birds. It is an absolutely terrific piece of work, demonstrating an emotional range most human performers would envy. A puffin, for instance, sounds like Frankie Howerd at his most ooh-missus-ish. Keep listening and you hear the sweet pastoral song of the goldfinch, which is said to resemble Japanese wind-chimes, and the melancholy threnody of the curlew. Of course, these are birds communicating with one another, not singing for our pleasure. This is not The Voice and I am not Tom Jones, yet it is hard to resist the urge to judge. Even the compiler of the sleeve notes, while mostly retaining a scientific objectivity, feels moved to offer occasional snarky appraisal. The song of the reed bunting, we learn, is "a typically feeble tune," while the poor corn bunting is disdained for its "monotonous accelerating jangle," making it, I suppose, the bird world's answer to early Primal Scream. The reason for driving on the M876 and listening to birdsong is that my father is ill. These journeys, first to the hospital, then to the home where I grew up, have been - over the last few months - frightening at the very start, then sad, and more recently lightened by notes of hope. He seems a little stronger lately, a little more ready to laugh, to engage with the world and the people who love him. I could hear the growing strength in his voice the other day when I phoned from St Cyrus on holiday. I mentioned the buzzards I could see soaring above the cliffs, and the pheasants making their strangled squawk in the fields behind the house. He seemed interested to hear about them. I like to sense it in him, this interest. My father has always been keen on the natural world. He and my mother feed the birds. Their little garden is hoaching with tits and finches, and though he isn't getting out of the house as much as he would like, my father enjoys watching them through the front window as they flit and chirp in the firethorn. Such are the consolations of ornithology. Birds have a tremendous capacity to soothe. Watching the buzzards in St Cyrus reminded me of the trips I made between my home in Glasgow and the hospital in Larbert, and how I would count the buzzards hunched on fenceposts and pylons at the sides of the motorway, sometimes making a game of it with my eldest boy, but mostly doing it silently inside, a sort of incantation or prayer. A prayer for what, I wonder. Perhaps for the strength and endurance these birds of prey seem to embody. Or perhaps it's a prayer of thanks for the very presence of the buzzards, which act - in their unwitting way - as both a distraction and an example. Buzzards mate for life. They build a home, raise young. As parents, they are admirable. They understand that family is about sticking together. You soar when you can. At other times you wait out the storm. Driving on the rain-slick M876, I listen to the buzzard on the car stereo. It was recorded in Dyfed in July 1979, when I was approaching my sixth birthday and my father was younger than I am now. Some of these recordings date back to the 1960s. Most of the birds in the anthology, and probably a number of the birders who once wandered meadows and marshes with microphones, will be dead. Yet there's really no sense of darkness when you listen. What you hear, rather, in the background of the buzzard's mewling is a light breeze, a distant skylark and the drowsy drone of a bee. It sounds like summer, like life, like peace, like the way things ought to be. It sounds like a cry from the heart.