Adam Nicholson, welcome to Writer's Voice.

Thank you so much for having me.

This is such a beautiful book.

I love your subtitle, A Beginner in the Wood.

That's what you were, really.

You had an encounter with a raven that was the catalyst for embarking on this bird school project.

And before that, you were pretty uninterested in birds.

I think you say you were blind and deaf to them.

It's true.

I'd always been very interested in seabirds because I used to go with my father on holiday to some islands in Scotland, which were an incredible seabird colony.

But the thing about seabirds is that they are huge and loud and obvious and they don't run away when you look at them.

And so seabirds are really the easiest birds to engage with.

They also lead these extraordinarily dramatic oceanic lives.

And so I wrote a book about seabirds called The Seabirds Cry a few years ago and was always aware that actually the birds that I am surrounded by every day at home in Sussex, in the south of England, in the woods and fields of the farm where I live, those birds I'd never really bothered to attend to.

They always ran away when you looked at them.

And they were kind of small, as if they were, they weren't important enough to be thought about or loved really.

But I was, as you say, in Crete with my wife, Sarah, and we saw this raven lying on the side of the road.

I think someone had shot it in the Cretan mountains.

And we stopped and looked, you know, looked carefully at it for a while.

I thought it might not actually be dead and it would be a kind of ferocious, enraged creature, but it was really utterly dead.

And so I could pick it up.

It was stiff, as stiff as a dried cod, I think I said in the book.

And just picking through its body was like investigating an abandoned house, I thought.

Rafters and furnishings and a sense of abandonment, a sense of an extraordinary life having been lived in that body, which the life had now left and all you were left with were the means by which the bird could have become the bird rather than the bird itself.

In other words, the birdiness of birds is actually the living quality of being a bird.

And I thought this is something I should really attend to.

And I felt some reproach of myself in not having attended to that liveliness of birds.

I had a friend, a great friend, who has been a lifelong birder.

He's always been saying to me, you know, listen to that, look at that.

And I would always be indifferent and blasé.

And I thought this was really disgraceful.

And that perhaps it was also symptomatic of something in the culture as a whole.

That the reason that so many of the birds in the world, in the industrialized world, in the developing world, so many of them are in such radical decline and danger is precisely because of the sort of indifference that I had is the indifference of the culture as a whole has.

We don't care.

And because we don't care, we are destroying them, have destroyed them, are still in the process of destroying them.

And so that's really I think what the kind of engine and motor of this book is.

It's to say to myself, look and learn and love.

That's really what the book's about.

Yet you say the inaccessibility of birds, their unknowable otherness, is actually central to their marvelousness, to their wonder.

Yeah, that's a paradoxical thing, isn't it?

That people have done some very good experiments that if you look at birds, they do fly away.

That is a scientific fact, especially if you look at birds with our front facing binocular stare, our two front facing eyes, because that is the stare of the predator.

That is the killing stare.

And there is something in birds that knows that if we look at them like that, that is a dangerous look.

And so the dignity of birds, I think, is that they don't need to attend to us.

In fact, they're much better off if they don't attend to us.

And there is a secrecy in the vitality of birds.

Not in seabirds, interestingly, because they spend their life out on the ocean where we on the whole are not.

But these land birds have learnt that to be looked at is dangerous.

And I think that there's a beauty in that.

There's a beauty in the indifference that they exhibit towards us.

It also makes it alluring.

You know, it's seductive, isn't it?

When a creature or person withdraws from you, if you are interested in them, you know, you think, oh, who are you?

No, what have you got?

What is your life?

And allow me to be with you.

So the answer for these birds, for these small land birds, is to hide, hide.

And I built a hide in the wood here.

And a hide is the only means by which they will allow us to be with them because we have to conceal ourselves.

Of course, there's an irony in that, too, that the one thing the predator does is hide.

And so there is something connected here, I think, that the desire to know is a kind of cousin attitude to the desire to catch.

And so I was very, very conscious of that throughout, that funnily enough, I was wanting to get these ungettable creatures.

Yet you say that you did not want to observe them, but to be with them.

And you built this, you just called it a hide, but it has a name, a birdhouse, not for birds to live in, but for you to be with them.

But you did actually build in nest boxes, and you had some birds who joined you in that space, even on a regular basis.

Was it a wren that came in?

Yeah.

So it was a little more than hiding entirely from them.

Yes.

Well, I thought one very interesting thing that occurred to me was that this was not only for an exercise in me imposing myself on them, but allowing them to, as you say, you know, be present in my life.

And so I said, you know, this should not be an observatory.

It was not for a distant view of them.

People always think when you get interested in birds, the first thing you should get is a pair of binoculars, but pair of binoculars is by definition a kind of relation to distance.

And I was more interested in making not an observatory, but an absorbatory, a place in which I could be and somehow almost osmotically absorb the birds.

And so this hide, which we call the birdhouse, because it was my obsession for two plus years when I was doing this book, a birdhouse that it was right buried in the trees.

It was on stilts and it was right in among the young oak trees in the wood, on the edge of the wood.

And also in the walls of the house, which is octagonal, I put nest boxes, which the birds could come into from the outside through various sized holes to nest.

But the inner wall, the wall of the nest boxes that looked into the inside of the hide, made of glass with a little door over them.

So it would be dark inside there, but I could open the door and see them.

And so, marvellously, the birds of the wood came to nest in these nest boxes.

And I remember last spring, I think it was last spring, sitting in there and realising that I think there were kind of 35 creatures in there with me.

So it was me and my two dogs and a great tit and two blue tits and their seven or eight little hatchlings in the nest boxes.

Also, it was a dormouse that decided to live in one of the nest boxes and a bat has also, maybe even a family bat, has taken up residence in this hide.

And so the thing became, like, do you remember, do you know what I mean by Edward Lear?

The fantastic 19th century naturalist and sort of half mad poet and painter.

Anyway, he has a wonderful limerick about a man who has an enormous beard and in his enormous beard, all kinds of birds set up their nests and live with him.

I did feel rather like Edward Lear's Man with a Beard, that somehow being accompanied by birds is a better way of being with them than looking at them through binoculars.

You've described this as a kind of passive connectedness, and this book, Bird School, is very much about overcoming what you quote one author as calling the severing, which is Adam Nicholson, as you write in Bird School, a deep disconnectedness in our idea of the world that separates reality into two shrink-wrapped categories, ourselves and nature.

And the antidote to that is something that you call fuzziness.

What is fuzziness?

Yes.

I mean, fuzziness, you know, when we were all at school, fuzziness would be the one thing that we would all be criticized for.

You know, if there wasn't a kind of clarity and tightly defined boundaries between things, somehow you weren't seeing things clearly.

But there is this wonderful man, Timothy Morton, who's English, but I know he teaches in Texas now.

Well, I say he, I know he identifies as they, but they, I'll just call him Timothy, says how really, how revelatory it is if you think that there is not a hard line between us and nature.

And that the inheritance of the idea of there being a hard line between us and nature is an inheritance from deep in human history.

Maybe with the beginnings of agriculture and cities in Mesopotamia, in whatever it is, 10,000 BC, when for the first time, people started to think that they were not part of nature, that nature somehow doesn't enter us as we breathe.

There is no such thing as an environment.

The whole notion of an environment is that somehow you are a kind of singular presence around which the environment, that word means the thing around you, exists.

There is, in fact, a kind of revelatory relationship to nature is one in which there is a flux and a flow and a recognition of similarity that, of course, with all vertebrates, we share a very, very deep evolutionary history.

And so there is something about this which means that if you don't think of nature as separate, you don't think of it as a quarry, as something to be used or extracted or even competed with.

It is actually part of how we are, that we are coterminous with nature.

And that's kind of, you know, this relates to this idea of an absorber tree, that in fact, if nature can flow in through and out of a building, through all its pores and into all its interstices and so on, then somehow you can come to an understanding of our own condition, which is richer and truer, and in fact, more generous to the world, the one in which you define yourself as distinct from nature.

And so I think that this is a difficult thing to talk about, because all of our language is founded on the idea that we are we and it is it.

And so you come to struggle with conceptions about there being no boundary at the skin.

But I think the notion of the breath is very helpful for that.

So if one can think that the entire world enters you as you breathe, then that can lead you to a relationship, for example, with birds that you wouldn't otherwise have.

I mean, not this doesn't need to be a sentimental picture of nature, and nature is ferociously competitive and ferocious in its mutual using of itself.

You know, it is about it is about use and hurt and and victory and destruction and death.

You know, but people tend to think of these small birds as rather sweet things.

Well, you don't need to look very hard at the life of small birds to see how deceitful they are.

They lie to their apparent partners that they were always on the lookout to see if they can have another sexual partner of some kind.

Most small birds, when you analyze the parenthood of eggs in their nest, you'll find that the putative father, the father, the male bird that thinks that is his nest is on the whole, or at least more than 50%, not the father of those eggs.

The father of those chicks that he's working so hard to raise and so on.

And so I think it doesn't need to be a kind of sweet pitch of this.

In fact, it's more interesting and more alive to think it's not sweet, but Darwinian in its competitiveness.

But that doesn't mean to say that we then need to be brutalized in our understanding of it.

I mean, I think even that word's bad, because it implies that to be like a brute, like an animal is less rich or worse than to be human or humane.

But, you know, those words, that's an example of how our language really imprisons our thinking about this kind of thing.

But I think to be humane is to recognize our animal, animal-ness in a way.

I mean, people are very worried about anthropomorphism and so treating small animals as if they were part of the human world.

Or at least that small animals are responsive to things in the way that we respond to them.

But that, I think, to be very, very anxious about that, I think, is a way of shutting yourself off from nature.

And one should be very relaxed about imagining that creatures have the same motives, same fears, same desires, same sense of longing or failure that we do.

You know, you can see it in bird life.

Yes, and actually what you're talking about is maybe the reverse of anthropomorphism.

Yes, zoomorphism is a word for it.

What is it?

Zoomorphism, it's like, you know, these are Greek words, so anthropomorphism just means a man shaped.

Well, zoomorphism, if we can treat ourselves as animal shaped, which is what zoomorphism means, then somehow doors open.

That's really lovely.

You were talking about how that separation started possibly, you know, 10,000 years ago, and yes, that could be very well true.

But your land, Perch Hill, you speak of it as showing that its history showed a different way of human beings dealing with the natural environment than is common in our industrialized, you know, extractive economies today.

Particularly in the late Middle Ages, you say, you know, that the generations of farmers who lived and worked the land molded the farm in a way that was always accommodating of natural life.

And you talk about the intermediate disturbance hypothesis that fits into that, so that's kind of a fancy term, but talk about how it wasn't that long ago, in fact, that human beings carried on their business in a way that even fostered more wildlife.

Yes, it's a very interesting thing, which I slowly came to recognize.

The farm that I live on is a small peasant farm, really.

I mean, nobody likes using that word, but peasant just means someone off the land, a peasant.

And it's a 90-acre farm with a lot of wood, small streams, small fields, thick hedges.

And it was made by people clearing the woodland here, probably in the 15th and 16th centuries, maybe before, but certainly the records from just after the Battle of Agincourt, I think in the 1420s, of the first farmers being here.

And the shape of the farm, I think, like many around here, was accommodating for the wild things, not necessarily because of a sort of ideological attitude or a kind of love of wild things, but through a lack of potency in the farmers themselves.

They could only do certain things, and they couldn't erase everything.

They had to live with what was here.

And so the whole thing obviously is worked by muscle, by oxen were here, pulling plows and horses by human muscle, no fossil fuels.

And so there is a lack of ability in the early modern world actually to do as much damage as the industrial tools allow us to do.

So the Intermediate Disturbance Hypothesis is an interesting theory.

It first began in marine studies, but has been applied to lots of different environments on earth.

And it's slightly unexpected in what it says, which is that occasional and spotty and patchwork disturbance is more accommodating for life than either total regular disturbance or no disturbance at all.

Because if you have total sort of destructive mashing, say by a hurricane or by a bulldozer, then obviously the things that can grow there are only those things that can sprout very quickly, the instant weeds.

And so you get a diminution of diversity.

But if you don't do anything at all, and you just allow those plants to grow, which would in the end utterly dominate here, it would be a closed canopy, very dark shadowy oak forest.

Then that is also a thing that I mean, a condition that diminishes diversity of life.

And so it's the intermediate disturbance.

It's an occasional disturbance.

It's occasionally cutting down a wood, occasionally mowing a hay meadow, occasionally trimming and laying down a hedge, occasionally allowing a bit of land to revert to woodland, which has been open grassland.

It's that sort of patchworky mosaic structure, which can accommodate all sorts of different forms of life.

The garden, the modern garden is actually a model of this.

It's exactly what gardeners do.

They allow bits to grow, they cut back, they make a lawn or whatever.

And so this form of farming here would have made exactly a world in which, without sprays, without over-fertilised and intensive grazing, without too heavy a drive for productivity on the land, would have accommodated all kinds of bird life, small mammal life, insect life and the rest of it.

And so it so happened that I came by chance 30 years ago or 35 years ago to this place and found something that was already going to be friendly to birds.

And I've only recently come to recognise that it's exactly this habit of land management that has allowed this to be as birdy as it is here now and it's really one of the great blessings of my life.

You reference in this book the rewilding movement.

And I have spoken with Isabella Tree about her book on rewilding the land that she is on, but you talk about repair rather than rewilding.

Why is that?

Yes, well, she's a great friend of mine and I love her dearly and I am a huge, huge admirer of what she's done at her place in Sussex.

The reason I don't want to rewild this farm is that the form of this farm is an absolutely amazing cultural inheritance.

That if this was made, well, 500 years ago, essentially, by a group of, a series of farming families here, then I think to let that go would be completely to abuse something very precious.

The actual interfolding of the cultural and the natural in the traditionally farmed landscape is, I think, something of incredible value.

I mean, I sometimes, if you think of that belt around the temperate latitudes of the world, of the human farmed landscape, what an amazing thing that is, really, as a sort of completely global presence of the kind of carefully and beautifully made thing from which sustenance can be drawn, in which nature can find a home, and in which people can be at home with the nature which is at home there.

And that interlocking of goals.

There are other things as well about carbon capture and biodiversity enhancement and all the rest of it, but I think that that inheritance of the ancient and beautifully made thing is not something that we should casually dismiss.

And I've talked to Izzy about this, and she said, yeah, of course, you know, different strokes for different folks.

And they had a very, very heavily abused chemical arable farm that they let go about.

Well, let go is not the right word, but they turned to rewilding about, what, 25 years ago.

And it's been amazing for them.

They have extraordinary bird and insect life there now, mammal life.

But for me, I think that to retain a kind of really richly made medieval structure, which is absolutely bursting with bird life and invertebrate life, is something of almost unspeakable value.

And so there's no way I would allow this to go.

So we have our cattle.

We graze a small herd of Sussex cattle and sheep and make hay in the hay meadows.

And we also have a garden, big garden here, which is entirely dedicated towards a kind of very, very deep, multi trophic layer structure for all the way up from ravens and buzzards to many different sorts of bees and all the rest of it.

And so I think just a full spectrum life, in other words, is Francesco, is what this is about.

The full spectrum from, you know, talking about Zen thought to the smallest ant and beetle is what I think one should aim for.

Nothing but the whole thing.

And speaking of ravens, I mean, we began this with a raven that was dead.

Very powerful moment in the book is when you see five ravens coming to Perch Hill.

It's a species that had been exterminated in the area over a hundred years ago.

Talk about that moment and what that meant for you.

Well, do you know what a raven sounds like, Francesca?

Can you do a raven?

No, please do one for us.

We have crows here.

Honk, honk, sort of loud.

People have looked at the throat structure of ravens and said they're nearest to the throat structures of some of the later dinosaurs.

And so when you're hearing a raven honk, this deep, authoritative voice, you're hearing the sounds of the Jurassic.

So I had longed for years for a raven to come back here because the gamekeepers basically shot them out in the late 19th, early 20th century and they retreated to the sea cliffs and also to the highlands of Wales and Scotland and to the far, far southwest of sea cliffs there.

And so for the ravens to return and to make this huge authoritative signal in the air, well, it's the voice, but also they have this absolutely dazzling flight habit of flicking.

They can flick, as they fly along, they can flick through 360 degrees and they play with each other and sort of taunt each other and chase each other.

Very, very intelligent birds and right, right high up in the food web, you know, because they prey on all kinds of things.

And so it was like the kind of the royal family returning when I heard the raven for the first time.

I couldn't quite believe it, but I heard them in Scotland and in the Lake District and I'm a great fan of William Wordsworth.

And he famously wrote a marvellous passage of the prelude as a boy, he goes hunting ravens in the crags of the Lake District in the north of England.

And I'd been to the to the crags where Wordsworth had chased his ravens.

And this was like a kind of statement that life was whole, that if the ravens were here, then the whole pyramid of life below them was also here.

I want to talk a little bit about Birdsong.

You mentioned the call of the raven, but I wanted to ask you more about Birdsong itself.

For one, you have a wonderful suggestion about the Merlin app, which is one that I know well and I use nearly daily, because it allows one to identify what birds are around by their song.

But also talk about what you learned about the intelligence of birds, speaking of the intelligence about song.

It's not just an instinctual thing, it's something that's learned.

Yes, it's an enormous subject, the question of Birdsong.

People have always thought that it's only male birds that sing, but that turns out not to be true.

It is true in Europe, oddly enough, but not in other parts of the world.

And people have always thought that a birdsong really only says to the females, marry me, and to the other males, get out of here.

Which is a very kind of basic idea that basically it's about sex and territory.

But it turns out that through long and complicated analysis, birdsong is capable of conveying a great deal more than that.

And that the blackbird, which is our most wonderful singer here, is not the same as the American blackbird.

But the blackbird says, okay, so he says, I'm a blackbird.

I'm here.

This is what my father sang.

And maybe this is what his father sang to him.

But I'm also going to copy what the neighbors say.

And I don't like the way that they copy what I say.

But I'm really one of the best blackbirds you could imagine.

Listen to this.

Listen to this.

I've been developing this all summer.

I started off singing rather simple things early on, but I've been practicing this all summer.

And by the end of June, July, I've really developed this astonishing aria.

So just shut up and listen and don't come anywhere near me, because this is how I am.

This is where I am.

This is my song.

This is the song I'm going to teach my sons.

And my entire universe is bound up in what I sing.

And so the thing about Birdsong, it's not simply a kind of statement.

There's a marvellous woman called Madame Despres, a Belgian philosopher, who talks about Birdsong as the aural body of the bird.

So the bird is not simply that kind of small feathered thing that you see sitting in the tree.

A bird is, in fact, the entire territory in which you can hear the bird.

And so the bird, the blackbird, actually exists as its song, for which its body is just merely the vehicle and the means by which the song is produced.

And so I think you can think of the whole of a piece of country like this filled with really large kind of multi-acre bodies of birds, which take the form just of song, a song which conveys all the meanings which any social animal requires.

And so that, along with Merlin and this ability to understand what you're listening to, is what I now think of when I walk through these fields.

I'm kind of walking through, almost like, you know, those old maps of Europe which are divided into hundreds and hundreds of little earldoms and duchies and prince bishoprics and the rest.

I think that's what this farm is now.

Endless little kingdoms of these kind of noble and dignified beings.

And it's very, very exciting transformation that.

You know, this is why I love your book so much, is that you have such a fresh look.

Yes, and you draw on the knowledge of many others, but you put it together in a way that offers us a new way of seeing and a new way of being.

Well, that's lovely to hear that.

I feel new about it.

I mean, I'm old.

I'm in my late 60s.

But I feel very bright about this, that somehow to tend to the reality of the bird's minds, in a way, is to find yourself in a completely renewed world.

Yes.

I want to just ask you one very practical question, and that's about bird feeding.

Because I feed birds, and recently I stopped, just because it's summer.

I thought, well, you know, I should feed them in the winter, but in the summer, I don't want them to just get dependent on me.

But you talk about the paradoxical effects of human interventions like bird feeding.

Should we feed birds, and should we not, or should we decide when is the best time to do that?

Yes, well, this is very difficult, because obviously feeding birds is marvellous, because they come near you, and you see them very clearly, and they are beautifully alive within feet of your eyes.

But bird feeders have certainly been implicated in the death of a large number of songbirds.

In this country, I don't know about the States, but in this country, green finches and chaffinches have both been absolutely decimated.

I mean, a huge proportion of their populations have been killed by the transfer of diseases through uncleaned feeders.

And the green finch population crashed, I think, by something like 80% as a result of these transmitted diseases.

And so the first thing is to say that you want to clean them, and people don't clean them because, you know, it's a sweat to clean them, isn't it?

And so people don't clean them, and they do often remain dirty, and they do transfer diseases.

So that is one thing to be said.

The other thing, which is kind of more subtle, which is that some birds are braver than others.

And in this country, the tits, like the chickadee relations, are very brave, and they come to bird feeders and thrive on them.

So by feeding those birds, by feeding the braver birds, you are favoritizing them and stimulating their populations.

And by no coincidence, those birds that come to bird feeders in this country are the species which are thriving.

And those species which do not or don't dare to come to bird feeders or don't like the idea of being as exposed as that are largely in decline.

And so we are, by feeding, we are distorting the bird populations.

And is that really what we want to do?

Do we really want to make large numbers of these fascinating and beautiful but very common birds and make life even more difficult for those that are much more threatened at the moment?

It's an extremely difficult question this, because if someone, for example, who finds it difficult to get out of the house, whatever, gets their absolute delight from seeing birds outside their window, then who knows, I'd say don't do that.

But I think one can at least be aware of this.

And so if, for example, I do this, so when my grandchildren come and I want them to see the birds, then for those few days when they come to stay, I'll put some bird feeders out just for a moment or two, for a day or two.

And then we have fun doing that, but then I put them away.

And so I think that occasional, intermittent as ever, moving them around from place to place so it's not always in the same place, because one of the things that sparrowhawks learn about where bird feeders are, is to treat it as a kind of a restaurant for them to pick off small birds.

So just to be subtle about it.

And you've got to love the grandchildren and you've got to love your granny, but think of the wider implications.

Great advice.

And what about feeding in the wintertime?

Yeah, I mean this is one of the problems that some of the birds in this country, the marsh tits and willow tits, are very well suited to the winter because they are clever at storing food for themselves in crevices in trees and stuff.

Whereas others, like for us the blue tits and great tits, they're not so good at that.

And so in the past, blue tits and great tits have been, their populations have been held down by deaths in winter, allowing those other tits, the marsh tits and willow tits, to survive and do well.

But now that we feed through the winter, then that evolutionary advantage developed by the willow tits and marsh tits is negated by our endless provision of food for the blue tits and great tits.

So as a result, marsh tits and willow tits are in decline.

So I think that in winter, funnily enough, these arguments apply even more strictly than at any other time.

And this is just one of, I mean, there's so much to learn about birds in this wonderful book, Bird School, A Beginner in the Wood.

You are no longer a beginner, but you helped me to begin on this journey of knowledge.

Thank you so much, Adam Nicholson, for talking with us here.

Well, thank you, Francesca.

It's been an absolute delight.

What's so interesting is if you read the diaries of the early, you know, the pioneers, the settlers in America, they described the eastern seaboard of America as being very much like an English parkland landscape.

And that's because you would have had wood bison having a big effect on ring barking and destroying trees.

You would have had apex predators in that landscape too, who would have been keeping down numbers of the deer.

So you'd have had a much fuller ecology and that itself would have been keeping the landscape much more open.

We tend to think of closed canopy forests as somehow being a kind of a natural state of nature.

But we forget that there would have been huge numbers of animals in that landscape that would have been interacting with the emerging scrub and trees.

And that would have created a much more open landscape.

And if you think about how important sunlight is to vegetation, particularly to flowering plants and to plants that are producing berries and seeds and nuts that are going to be eaten by other wildlife.

They need sunlit conditions.

There are very few species that tolerate complete shade, closed canopy woodland.

So I think wherever you see closed canopy woodland, you know, a question mark needs to come up into our heads.

Is this really natural?

What are we missing here?

What big animals should be here to trash it a bit, to open it up?

And of course, if you think back into the far distant past, there would have been many, many more animals, megafauna in America.

Camelids, for example.

I think you had five species of camel.

The camel came from America in the first place.

Horses, mammoths, mastodons.

You would have had giant sloths.

You would have had huge numbers of enormous, heavy-hitting megafauna that would have been opening up this so-called forest, this Eden idea that we have in our heads.

So I think that's what we've discovered here at NEP is that by using free-roaming herbivores in this way, they are, in essence, a keystone species.

The way they interact with vegetation can kick-start natural processes again.

It can hold back the succession of trees, and that is not necessarily a bad thing.

Of course we need trees in our landscape, but we don't necessarily need them close canopy and everywhere.

What we need is the dynamism and that shifting kaleidoscope that so many species need.

So many species depend on different habitats in their life cycle, and that's what we need is that rubbing up together of different habitats to facilitate all these different species.

Yes, and there's a very important place for the lowly scrub, for bushes.

I wonder if you could talk about that because it's something I have never heard of before, and of course a tendency of so many farmers and other people as well is just to cut down every bit of brush imaginable so you can create something that looks pristine.

Yeah, it's amazing, you know, what control freaks we are.

And, you know, certainly in the UK, you know, scrub is considered wasteland, people look at it and they think it's an abomination and, you know, put in big machines you can get rid of it in hours, minutes sometimes.

We just have zero tolerance for it.

But scrub is one of the most biodiverse habitats there is, and particularly if it's thorny scrub.

So, in the UK we have species like bramble, dog rose, hawthorn, blackthorn.

As soon as you've got thorny scrub, gorse even, it offers huge protection for nesting birds, for small mammals, even for insects to keep them safe from predation.

That's where you see the insects, the butterflies, the dragonflies, all hovering is in that margin where they can keep away from predation.

And so it's hugely biodiverse.

And of course it's how trees naturally regenerate in the landscape without human intervention.

It's nature's barbed wire in a way.

So in the UK we have a wonderful bird called the Jay, a bit like your Jay, but our Jay can plant 6,000 acorns, one bird can plant 6,000 acorns in four weeks.

And it will do that by planting them near a piece of thorny scrub where it can remember a vertical that it will be able to remember where it stashed them.

And that's where you see these new oaks popping up, protected as they grow by the thorny scrub from even browsing by rabbits or browsing by deer.

So thorny scrub really is nature's way of regenerating trees in the presence of grazing and browsing animals.

You mentioned, Isabella Tree, you mentioned the intolerance for scrub.

You faced a lot of resistance from local farmers about that and the other things that you've done with the whole rewilding project at NEP.

Has this local opposition shifted over the years and how have you weathered it, if not?

Yeah, we had a lot of opposition in the early days.

We had, I mean, you know, shed loads of letters being delivered to our door.

We had poems written to the local newspaper about ragwort, which is considered an injurious weed and we shouldn't be tolerating it at all in our landscapes.

I think it was understandable in the early days.

We've grown up with this picture postcard idea of how our British landscape should look like.

It's manicured, it's micromanaged, it's got neat edges, canalised rivers, everything is controlled and it somehow makes us feel secure.

And we've come to consider that as beautiful.

It's very much a sort of an aesthetic that is in our cultural DNA.

And so, obviously, if you're used to looking at that so-called beautiful landscape across your fence and you see, you know, it's been left to rack and ruin and suddenly you've got thistles and docks and ragwort, you've got thorny scrub popping up and animals trampling the place and pigs rootling, you're going to be horrified.

And I think it took a while for that sort of horror to simmer down.

I think it began when we started to hear nightingales again, when suddenly the birdsong erupted.

Slowly, our neighbours, I think, began to realise that there was method in our madness.

And of course, once those dramatic early stages are over, the vegetation begins to calm down a little bit.

The animals, you get used to seeing them and they start interacting with the vegetation, so there's not so much growth.

And I think then slowly people's aesthetics began to change.

We had a letter from one particular woman in the early days, Charlie, saying, your grandparents would be rolling in their graves.

What you've done is turned something beautiful into an abomination.

And the same woman wrote to us last year apologising.

And she said, you know, I was early off the mark.

I didn't really know what I was saying.

I felt affronted because the change happened very quickly and it made me quite fearful.

But now I'm beginning to understand that NEP is still beautiful.

It's just different.

It's beautiful in a different way.

And I think more than anything, that made me realise that people's minds can change.

The mindset can change.

We've now joined a farm cluster of 31 farmers, neighbours of ours, all looking at ways in which they can get nature back onto their land and that they can do something for wildlife.

They're not going to rewild, at least not yet.

Maybe one or two of them will do eventually.

But, you know, everyone's on a journey.

And I think there's definitely more interest now in getting nature back onto farmland.

I think we're beginning to understand how we've abused the soil, how we've destroyed wildlife and biodiversity and that it's not sustainable.

And there's a really interesting shift out there, a real movement, a real hunger to work with nature and get wildlife back.

And I think that's just incredibly exciting.