Despite the plural in its title, British composer Eric Coates' Bird Songs at Eventide is not a song cycle, or even a group of songs. It is just a single small song, a few pages long, a 1926 setting of two slim stanzas of Royden Barrie verse. "Quiet hills," an "echoing vale," the "golden sun" sinking "in the dreaming west," and the soft call of " bird songs at eventide": the first half of Barrie's poem sets up a warm and quietly glowing twilight, a soft cushion for the second stanza's languid turn toward romance. Coates sets both of the stanzas to the same lavender sweetmeat music. The four-measure piano introduction seems, with its gently descending harmonies and twinkling trills, to mimic the sunset of the poem; these opening bars also establish a light middle-voice syncopation that persists in the accompaniment throughout the song. The body of the song is not remarkable for any invention or innovation (two things that Eric Coates was little interested in), but it is finely wrought, and the little irregularities of phrase length (4 + 6 for the bodies of both stanzas) raise the music out of the ordinary. The last two lines of text are repeated at the end of the song to make a lush, chromaticism-basted climax, and the song ends as it began—with a four-bar piano fling.

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