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

Here human enterprise and the natural world are braided together. Nothing is entirely wild or unwild and the generations of farmers who lived and worked this land have moulded the farm in a way that was always accommodating of natural life. Their system was cyclical and only intermittently disruptive. Each part of the wood in turn would be coppiced every twelve or fifteen years and otherwise allowed to grow on in peace. In some years, the grass in the meadows would be left to grow until July so that hay could be made there. In the intervening years the fields would be grazed by the pasturing animals. In winter those animals would be housed and the hay fed to them. All winter the farm would be left wet and empty and only in the following spring the dung spread across it.

The impact of those farmers was not relentless or even continuous. In both space and time, the human influence was irregular and patchy, scarcely imposing for a while, but then – in the hay harvest, in the laying or pleaching of a hedge that had outgrown itself as a barrier to stock or in the coppicing of a few acres of wood – radically invasive, entirely changing the environment in which plants and creatures lived, at least for a while.

There is no evidence that the making in the Middle Ages of small Wealden farms like this one involved a diminution of their wildlife. It is impossible to be sure but in many ways the traditional shape of Perch Hill is not unlike that of the natural, post-glacial world – the one to which the modern rewilding movement often looks – with the difference that human beings were an integral part of it.

The ecologist Ben Macdonald has described the benefits brought to birdlife by the interventions of medieval man.

Perch Hill: a farm buried in a wood

In place of aurochs-grazed pastures, we put to work tiny groups of cattle and pigs. In place of wild wood-pastures, we planted orchards. An organic orchard holds twice as many earthworms per square metre as dense woodland. If you were a blackbird or any other pasture-feeding species, you were winning. Birds that evolved in scrub-grasslands, whether red-backed shrikes or turtle doves, thrive under extensive grazing … Coppicing woodlands, as the late Oliver Rackham observed, recreates the tree-breaking actions of bison – or the zealous activity of beavers. If you were a nightingale or a willow tit, you were winning.

Charcoal burners in the hornbeam woodlands kept the right conditions going for nightjars and woodlarks. Hay meadows were perfect for corncrakes and other insect eaters. When in July I walk across one of our bigger fields called Great Flemings, named after the man who farmed it in the sixteenth century, it can be thick with grasshoppers, meadow brown butterflies and other insects fizzing out of the stems in front of me. I reckon there can be fifty or even a hundred in every square yard. The meadow is big, two hundred yards by three hundred, so it must hold hundreds of thousands of grasshoppers, an enormous resource for insect-eating birds across a summer.

This pattern of maintenance and dependence that came and went is unlike the repetitive and constant impositions of modern agriculture but it is intriguingly like the world described in an idea of natural richness that emerged in the 1970s. The theory has a clumsy name – the intermediate disturbance hypothesis – but it enshrines the understanding that natural life thrives not in a world of brutal and constant change, nor in unbroken calm, but somewhere in the middle of those extremes. Too much destruction reduces biodiversity. If a field is ploughed every year, or if a hurricane regularly destroys a forest, a natural world of any richness will not develop. Only the plants and animals that can rapidly recolonise a place would be given a chance before the next round of demolition and dismantling. Counterintuitively, the same is true of too little destruction. Dominant competitors outreach everything else. In Sussex, nothing but a solid, shady oak wood would grow. First, the birds of the open grassland – the skylarks – would fade away. For a while birds of a rich scrubby undergrowth – the warblers and nightingales – would come and sing but as the oak cover thickened they too would disappear and you would be left only with the remnants of tits and finches.

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.