Latest news with #BirdSchool:ABeginnerintheWood
Yahoo
09-05-2025
- Politics
- Yahoo
Nigel's fishy business
Nigel Farage has got his own reasons to hope that British fishermen get a good deal from quota negotiations with Brussels: he has bought a commercial fishing boat. He told me on GB News: 'I don't run it myself. I'm rather too busy. I have a skipper that runs that boat, and I'm not making any money on it. I can promise you, the rules and regulations put upon our small commercial fleet since Brexit are worse than they were as members of the European Union.' Will Farage's fishing boat be a line in the negotiations over access to UK waters when Sir Keir Starmer and EU president Ursula von der Leyen sit down for talks in 10 days' time? A spiky exchange between Adam Nicolson, the grandson of Vita Sackville-West, and Peter York, author of The Sloane Ranger's Handbook, at this week's Oldie literary lunch. Nicolson – who has written a new book, Bird School: A Beginner in the Wood – told guests of an 'awkward experience' with York at the start of the lunch. Nicolson said: 'I said I had written a book about birds and he said 'Hmm, All very good, I suppose, but I'm not interested in a book about nature'.' Nicolson added that he 'felt reproached by my friend', before explaining the prolific sex life of a wren. Afterwards, York tried to make light of 'a bit of sparring', but added: 'I'm here to represent the urban bourgeois point of view. Much as I love your work, Adam, I'm less interested in wrens than your book on the gentry which showed what it did to people back in the day, decapitation and ghastly things to your tummy.' Gentlemen, please! Happy Birthday to Greg Dyke, the former BBC director general and ITV breakfast television boss who turns 78 this month. Mystifyingly he has never been given a knighthood, unlike other BBC directors general. Boris Johnson tried his best, wrongly referring to him as 'Sir Greg Dyke, the former director general of the BBC' in his memoir Unleashed. Dyke tells me Johnson's surprise 'K' was news to him, adding: 'I've always assumed I'm on some blacklist for honours, not that I'm particularly bothered either way.' Johnson is sticking to his guns. 'I am surprised he doesn't have one,' he tells me. 'He certainly deserves it, if only for creating Roland Rat.' Students gathered at the Cambridge Union to debate the impact of Reform UK. The motion – 'Reform is the real Opposition' – was proposed by former Conservatives Ann Widdecombe and Marco Longhi, and opposed by ex-Tory Cabinet ministers Sir Andrew Mitchell and Sir Robert Buckland. Mitchell and Buckland won the debate and the biggest applause when Mitch explained that – while he had the good fortune to be educated at Cambridge, 'the greatest university in the world' – Widdecombe had made do with 'a second-rate university called Oxford'. Never underestimate the cunning of a former chief whip. Pop star Robbie Williams says he has not sold out his summer tour yet. 'People ask, 'Are there any tickets left for your stadium tour this summer?' Well, there's a few left for the second night of the Emirates at the Arsenal,' he said as he launched his new art exhibition at Moco Museum, in Marble Arch, London. He added: 'Some may call me a national treasure. Well, I say, 'What point is there being a national treasure if you don't give some of that treasure away in the form of merchandise and affordable yet aspirationally priced drinks?.'' Perhaps unsurprisingly, his new exhibition is titled Radical Honesty. A cricket cap has been hung behind the bar of the cricket pavilion at Windsor Castle in honour of David Knowles, the Telegraph journalist who hosted the Ukraine: The Latest podcast until his untimely death last year. David's team, the Larkhall Wanderers, played the Royal Household Cricket Club last weekend in a charity match that raised £10,000 for the British Heart Foundation. Larkhall overcame long odds to win by nine wickets. His team's cap now rests above a bat signed for Queen Elizabeth II by the late Pope Francis. Scottish actor Alan Cumming, 60, is presenting tomorrow night's Bafta awards. He caused a stir two years ago by handing back his OBE – received from Princess Anne in 2009 – blaming what he described as the 'toxicity of empire'. Will he dare raise his concerns with the Prince of Wales, who is also the president of Bafta? Peterborough, published every Friday at 7pm, is edited by Christopher Hope. You can reach him at peterborough@ Broaden your horizons with award-winning British journalism. Try The Telegraph free for 1 month with unlimited access to our award-winning website, exclusive app, money-saving offers and more.
The Guardian
13-04-2025
- General
- The Guardian
Bird School by Adam Nicolson review – where are all our feathered friends?
In the very English scene of a long-settled farm in the depths of the Sussex countryside, the nature writer Adam Nicolson has produced what amounts to an update of the traditional nursery rhyme Who Killed Cock Robin?. The poem performs the obsequies for the poor redbreast but is also a roll call of the other birds of old Albion: the thrush, the owl, the dove and more. In Bird School: A Beginner in the Wood, Nicolson sets out to educate himself about these species and discover why avian mortality is a considerably bigger problem now than it was when the ballad of Cock Robin was first heard. Since the 1960s, numbers of song thrushes in the UK have fallen by 40%, from a population of approximately 100,000 to about 60,000, according to the British Trust for Ornithology. There are half as many tawny owls in our woods since the 1970s, and the decline of turtle doves is even more vertiginous: we've lost 90% of them in the past 60 years. (Though the robin is faring rather better: from a nadir in the mid-80s when fewer than 100,000 specimens were recorded, the ranks have swelled to a healthier 150,000 today.) In Nicolson's lifetime, the heavens have emptied of birds: though partly as a response to this, every new publishing season finds the skies black with books about our feathered friends. There has been a spectacular murmuration of birder-authors in recent years, including Tim Dee, Stephen Moss and Deborah Cramer. In a decorated career, Nicolson has written about wetlands, the Hebrides and rock pools, but admits: 'I had never paid any attention to birds. I had not cared about them.' However, it's an iron law of the book trade that a nature writer in need of a subject will sooner or later turn their attention to the treetops. A gentleman farmer, Nicolson enlists friends and farmhands to build him a hide, a bespoke treehouse, to pursue his research – an episode that delightfully recalls the squire-servant relationship of Ted and Ralph from The Fast Show. Of all the wild creatures that surround us, birds are perhaps the most appealing, the least wild. We are soppy about dogs and cats in this country, but we also fork out £250m a year on bird victuals. According to Nicolson, the feeders and bird tables in British gardens groan under 150,000 tonnes of treats including fat balls stuffed with insects – the mini-kievs of bird gastronomy – enough to fill up all the visitors who are ever likely to call in our back yards three times over. So how to explain their melancholy absence? Intensive farming, including the loss of hedgerows, is a major culprit in the plummeting bird population, as is the wider problem of the climate emergency (though rising temperatures may tempt long-lost species like the golden oriole back to the British landscape). It's not only ornithologists who have these airborne targets in their sights. At one time, Nicolson says, tens of thousands of birds perished so that their feathers could furnish women's hats, and now the commonest bird in the UK is not the homely sparrow but the pheasant. A staggering 28m or more game birds, bred for sport, fall to guns every year. The fate of Cock Robin, who met a violent death in midair, is re-enacted on our moors and estates to this day. Bird School is elegant and involving. Like one of the nests Nicolson finds on his property, it's been deftly assembled. The findings in his pages are also a little like birds' eggs: they wink up at you fascinatingly before you realise that some of what you're looking at is smashed. Bird School: A Beginner in the Wood by Adam Nicolson is published by William Collins (£22). To support the Guardian and Observer order your copy at Delivery charges may apply
