This is the season of songbirds – the nightingales and skylarks whose voices resonate in poetry and music as well as nature. But with their numbers in freefall, could we lose them for ever?

It all began at two minutes to six on May Day last year, when the sonorous tones of Sir David Attenborough combined with the equally unmistakable call of the cuckoo, heralding the start of Tweet of the Day.

The response to the Radio 4 series, produced by my old colleagues at the BBC Natural History Unit in Bristol, surprised even the programme-makers themselves. Despite the early slot, millions of listeners have regularly tuned in to get their daily dose of birdsong.

Almost a year on, the radio series will soon reach its end, with Kate Humble's account of one of our more elusive birds, the stone curlew. After 260 programmes featuring 245 different species, the airwaves will fall silent.

Listeners' sense of loss may be alleviated by the BBC's decision to put the entire series on its website, and produce a book, of which I am a co-author. But when future generations download the recordings, and listen to skylarks and nightingales, cuckoos and turtle doves, will they feel a twinge of sadness that these species are no longer with us?

According to the British Trust for Ornithology, if current population trends continue, it is highly likely that some of these birds will not just decline in numbers, but may disappear from Britain altogether. We know this because of the efforts of more than 40,000 amateur birdwatchers, who together provided almost 20m records of nearly 300 bird species for the mammoth Bird Atlas survey, the full results of which were published in book form last autumn.

Take the turtle dove: the BTO predicts that this attractive summer visitor could go extinct as a British breeding bird by the year 2025. Having declined by 90% since the 1970s, the species has gone into freefall in the past decade, with numbers falling by a further 77%.

Turtle doves have suffered from a triple whammy: intensive farming methods, especially on arable fields, which have drastically reduced their available food supply of weed seeds; drought on their wintering grounds in Africa; and the wholesale slaughter of migratory birds as they pass over the Mediterranean, particularly on the island of Malta, where gangs of young men blast any bird that flies overhead out of the sky.

The likely fate of the turtle dove is not just a tragedy for the environment, but for our culture, too. One of the first references to birdsong in the Bible, in the Song of Solomon, mentions this species: "The time of the singing of the birds is come. And the voice of the turtle is heard in our land."

The bird's unusual name refers to the soft "tur-tur" call, which was once a classic sound of summertime in rural Britain.

The skylark is another bird more famous for its song than its appearance. Skylarks are smallish, brown birds with a perky crest and streaky plumage. But when they take to the air, they are transformed, hanging like a dust-spot in the blue summer skies for what seems like hours on end, delivering their extraordinary song.

Reading on mobile? Click here to watch skylark song video

Poets and composers have long been mesmerised by the skylark's song, including Shelley, whose Ode to a Skylark opens with the unforgettable pronouncement: "Hail to thee, blithe spirit! / Bird thou never wert … "

Another celebration of the skylark's song was originally written as a poem, The Lark Ascending by George Meredith, in the late 19th century. The composer Ralph Vaughan Williams took inspiration from Meredith in his musical version of the skylark's song, also titled The Lark Ascending, first performed in 1920. He may have been responding to the skylark's central place in the first world war: soldiers in the trenches noted in their diaries that the song of the skylark was the only natural sound they would ever hear.

But according to the latest figures from the BTO, this once-ubiquitous farmland bird's population has declined by one-third – some three-quarters of a million pairs – since 1986. As with the turtle dove, the move towards more intensive arable farming, with crops planted all year round, which reduces both food and nesting habitat for the skylark, is to blame.

The skylark is not the only bird whose sound has influenced generations of poets, writers and composers. Beethoven incorporated snatches of the cuckoo, quail and nightingale in his Pastoral Symphony, while the 20th-centure French composer Oliver Messiaen went even further, using the sounds of species such as the golden oriole, woodlark, and even the harsh cries of the alpine chough in his musical works. Popular music has taken inspiration from birdsong, too, perhaps most famously in Paul McCartney's Blackbird.

But of all Britain's birds, one species dominates our artistic culture: the nightingale. The nightingale isn't all that much to look at: rather like a larger version of the robin, but without the red breast. That may be just as well, for it is also one of the most difficult of all British songbirds to see.

Nightingales are summer visitors to Britain, returning here from their wintering home in Africa towards the end of April. When they arrive, you have a brief opportunity to actually see one, as males will sing right out in the open as they try to attract a passing female. But as soon as they have paired up, both male and female retreat into the deepest, densest woodland scrub, and are rarely seen again.

The males continue to sing for another few weeks, mostly in the dead of night when, in the absence of other natural and man-made noises, their song echoes around you like no other sound on Earth. Then, having successfully raised a family, they head back south, barely three months after they first arrived.

By rights, nightingales should be doing rather well. They are a common and widespread species in continental Europe, and climate change offers them the opportunity to extend their range northwards in Britain. Yet for the past few decades, theirs has been another sorry tale of decline: numbers are down by half since the previous BTO Atlas survey 20 years ago. The main culprit is the introduced muntjac deer, whose constant grazing has destroyed the wooded understorey where the nightingales nest.

Each male nightingale has a repertoire of dozens of different phrases – some passionate and tuneful, others bizarre – which combine to create one of the most memorable sounds in nature.

Reading on mobile? Click here to watch nightingale song video

Keats wrote one of his best-known poems, Ode to a Nightingale, when listening to one singing in his Hampstead garden in the spring of 1819. More than a century later, in 1939, lyricist Eric Maschwitz was similarly inspired to write one of the most famous of all second world war songs, A Nightingale Sang in Berkeley Square.

Ever since, ornithologists have been at pains to point out that the chances of hearing a nightingale in central London are virtually non-existent, and that the bird was far more likely to have been that persistent nocturnal songster, the robin. But this is to misunderstand the writer; he is so in love with the girl of his dreams that he imagines all kinds of unlikely events – including the eponymous urban nightingale – whenever he thinks of her.

But perhaps the most extraordinary example of the long and eventful interaction between birdsong and culture occurred a few decades earlier, in May 1924, when cellist Beatrice Harrison performed a duet with a singing nightingale at the bottom of her Surrey garden. The event was broadcast on the new BBC radio service, in what appears to be the very first example of an outside broadcast.

The response to the programme was unprecedented: the BBC received an astonishing 50,000 letters asking to hear the broadcast again. Not only did the corporation happily accede to these requests, but it continued to restage the event for almost two decades.

Only when, in 1942, the engineers realised that their microphones were picking up the sound of RAF aircraft heading towards Germany did they pull the plug, fearing that a listening spy might warn the enemy of the coming air raid. Thus an extraordinary chapter in the history of radio broadcasting – and ornithology – finally reached its end.

Tweet of the Day, by Brett Westwood & Stephen Moss, is published by Saltyard Books at £25.

How to hear a nightingale

There are now fewer than 7,000 singing nightingales in Britain, so hearing them takes preparation, time and effort. They are confined to the area south and east of a line between the Severn Estuary and the Wash, with the main hotspots in East Anglia, Kent and Essex. Top sites include Salthouse Heath in North Norfolk, Minsmere RSPB reserve in Suffolk, Stodmarsh and Blean Woods near Canterbury in Kent, and Fingringhoe Wick in Essex – home to the highest density of nightingales in Britain. Arrive at dusk on a fine, warm, still evening between late April and early June – and be prepared to wait! But nightingales do sometimes sing in broad daylight – so maybe you'll be lucky.