The ASBO Chorus

Lying awake at 6am, having been wrenched from happy dreams by the dawn chorus, I decided – No, I'll be precise here. Staggering around in a sleep-deprived daze the next day, mind wandering at random, I decided the following. The dawn chorus is the equivalent of a night club. The attendees kick up a hell of a racket at anti-social hours in the hope of copulating.

I know what people say about bird song. I agree with them too. Bird song can be sublime, heavenly, enchanting. Nonetheless, it is all about bonking. Human tunes can be sublime, heavenly and enchanting too, and most of them are also to do with bonking. I've often wondered why a great majority of our songs are obsessed with love and the attending actions. Perhaps we are unconsciously just mimicking the birds.

We do so in very few other fields. It is frequently said that today's society is highly sexualised. Perhaps compared to the Victorian era; but next to the animal kingdom it is a wet Sunday in Grimsby. And the most debauched, libidinous societies in history cannot match up to, say, the average duck pond. Animals are motivated by two things only: food and sex. That's pretty much it. When they have eaten they want to breed. When they're not eating or breeding they're stopping others humping 'their' partners. They devise elaborate territorial patterns, intricate feathers or furs and, of course, beautiful songs – and it's all about sex. Whereas we have denigrated and marginalised it. A raft of new desires have been created. Sex is either shut into private compartments or defined as perverse.

I quite like the dawn chorus, when the damn thing isn't waking me at some ungodly time. (Dawn, I suppose). But it's amusing how a breed so prudish about sex has treated this shameless display of libido. It's seen as heavenly and put in the same twee category as a sunset or a teardrop. In fact it's a bunch of blokes sat in a hedge bellowing “Shag me! I'm great!” If humans tried it, the police would scoop them up quicker than you can say “Anti-social behaviour order.”