Our Wild Things columnist Eric Brown surveys a book which explains why mammals and birds make the sounds they do, what these messages mean and questions whether they actually amount to language.

We are always surrounded by the sounds of nature wherever we live or wherever we visit whatever the time of the year.

These sounds are inescapable. Whether it is a blackbird waking us up with its rich fluty spring song, ducks quacking in the local park or maybe an elephant trumpeting on a holiday safari our ears are assailed by natural aural delights.

A fox screams in the night, a frog croaks by a river or one of those pesky parakeets screeches its tuneless message. When we hear these things we might pause and say, "Ah, parakeet or oh, a frog." But how many of us actually stop to think why these sounds are made or what they mean?

Field biologist Nicolas Mathevon sets out to explain in a new book called The Voices of Nature, How and Why Animals Communicate.

Globetrotting Mathevon enjoys the rather elongated title of Distinguished Professor of Neurosciences and Animal Behaviour at the University of St Etienne. Try getting that on a conference name badge. But there's more. He's also a senior member of the Institut universitaire de France, member of Academia Europea and president of the International Bioacoustics Society.

So he seems eminently qualified to explain why a robin is singing in your garden. Mathevon outlines how the science of bioacoustics works to decipher ways animals make and hear sounds, what information is encoded in those sound signals and how this information is used.

Whether it is communicating with offspring, sounding an alarm, exchanging information like starlings do in murmurations, how sounds travel underwater or how birds and mammals learn to vocalise, Mathevon deals with it all.

And he discusses whether all these sounds actually amount to language.

Mathevon has some fun with the Eurasian wren. This is one of the smallest British birds yet it manages to project a mighty song with enormous effort involving shaking and wobbling its entire body. Mathevon played several recordings of different wrens in a wood and found the local wrens reacted violently to a control song recorded at close quarters, landing on the loudspeaker as they searched frantically for the territory intruder. But when played a wren song recorded at distance they were content to sing from the treetops. Conclusion? The wrens recognised the first song seemed to be coming from another wren presenting an immediate threat in their territory. With the second recording they remained relaxed after realising any threat was much farther away and presented no immediate danger.

But Methvon's research is not limited to birds. Caimans, hyenas, dolphins, seals, bees, gibbons, bats and others are featured as Mathevon casts his scientific net on a round-the-world aural journey from the steamy heat of Amazon jungle to the icy Arctic terrain. A significant contribution to the art of aural animal science.