This 3 minute piece for SSAATTBB unaccompanied choir is a take on Elizabethan bird song pieces, with their ‘jug-jug, peewit’ refrains. The subtitle is ‘the arrival of a few summer migrants,’ and the text is a list of birds interspersed with a few words by Auden—‘Spring with its thrusting leaves and its jargling birds is here again’. The music attempts, not too seriously, to imitate the songs of birds such as the spotted fly-catcher and the corncrake, in the latter case using a comb as a percussion instrument. The piece was commissioned by the Britten Singers for their inaugural concert in April 1991.