Excerpt from Bird School by Adam Nicolson, plus links to reviews, author biography & more

It should be – and probably always was – somewhere that is congenial to birds, but, along with the rest of the country, the bird life here had diminished. Could it be made better? Was that even possible?

I began to feel that to learn about birds and to make a bird-friendly place might be two halves of one idea. Learn the birds and their needs, understand the deep story and disciplines of this farm, and the two goals could coalesce. A good place could make its birds, just as birds could make a place, not only as key ingredients in its ecology, playing their part in its complex trophic structures, but by making it 'hum with the frequencies of the unconscious', as the poet and novelist Kapka Kassabova has said of her much-loved homeland in Bulgaria. Birds are the voice of a wood early in the year and the form in which that wood takes wing as the fledglings leave the nest in summer. They are the upper register in the music of anywhere that is vital and flourishing. And so, I hoped, as I became alive to the birds, the place might become alive to them.

History is thick here. Much of the land on this farm and its neighbours is not unlike a rough, overgrown garden. The ways down into the woods are narrow and arched. Oak trees hang their limbs over the gateways and ancient many-stemmed hazels push up towards them. The midwinter sunshine comes between the trees and spreads its broken beams over the gates, throwing shadows on the grass in parallelograms of light and shade.

Choose any one of these entrances into the hidden and sunken lanes that cross this woody country and the place closes over, moss-lined, in spring wallpapered with primroses and wood anemones, coming to the little tree-roofed streams that are creased into the clays and sandstones.

Most of that wooded lowland of the Sussex Weald has been almost forgotten now, the coppiced trees neglected for decades so that each stem from their ancient stools has become a full-grown forest plant, which here and there has crashed out in winter gales to lie horizontal among its neighbours.

I do not know of a landscape that is so full of the suggestions of the past, perhaps because modernity has abandoned so much of it. Many of the woods have returned to a wildness they have not had since the Dark Ages. The old handmade structures moulder – not only the lanes, but the woodbanks that once protected the young trees from the deer, the coppice stools themselves, the jigsawed outlines of field and wood, the remote abandoned ponds long ago dammed for ironworks, the pits where the farmers dug for the limy marl to sweeten their acid soils.

Mossy medieval woodbank and lane on the edge of High Wood with overgrown chestnut coppice

The fields of Perch Hill Farm surrounded by the ancient woodland from which they were cut in the late Middle Ages

It still bears in its bones memories of deep poverty and hard labour. Try digging a posthole in the clay or even burying a pet or a dead lamb in the corner of a field and you soon know how intractable the land is: the lanes were mostly impassable all winter, or would have needed a team of oxen to drag a wagon through their clag; and hardly a day of sunshine passes before that stolid stickiness transmutes into an equally unaddressable concrete. No one who could have chosen to farm elsewhere would have opted for these difficulties.

The need for intense, body-racking work created a landscape of interlinked privacies, a place infused with human life, with the woods planted some with hornbeam, for its strength and its ability to make the best of hot-burning charcoal; with ash, for the all-important lightness in the handles of rakes or scythes; and oak for everlasting robustness, to make the thatched houses, barns and byres of which each separate farmstead consisted. Historically, fields were tiny, often no more than one or two acres. And farms were small, twenty or thirty acres, with a few cows, some pigs and chickens. Oxen were the draught animals of choice but this was farming on the level of gardening.

Excerpted from Bird School by Adam Nicolson. Copyright © 2025 by Adam Nicolson. Excerpted by permission of Farrar, Straus & Giroux. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.