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

Rough grounds, the half-accommodated land, neither woodland nor pasture, nor orchard nor arable, but something that still had one foot in the unchanged, pre-anthropic world. Not rewilded but wild nonetheless, pre-cultured, living in the borderlands of nature and culture. Rough grounds was the early modern term for a place where the intermediate disturbance hypothesis held sway.

The oldest document of all came from that marginal territory, an act of transfer between father and son but describing a place that had scarcely been taken in from the wild. The deed is a beautiful thing, a small document, folding up to the size of a postcard and written on stiff parchment, with a seal still hanging from it. It was drawn up on Monday 7 June 1419, four years after the English archers had destroyed the French nobility at Agincourt. By it, a Burwash man John Ringmer gave the land to his son Richard, a transaction witnessed by four of their neighbours, and calling the place not Perch Hill (a name it acquired only in the late sixteenth century) but something older and more visceral: Sweating Croft, or as it is spelled by the medieval clerk, Swetyngcroft.

What did it mean? A piece of land so hard to work that it could be identified by the sweat it drew from the farmer? Or land, as Perch Hill still is, so wet with springs, dripping like a man swinging his scythe at the hay all one long summer morning? Or both? A place so wet that only unrelenting work could bring it within the human fold? There is no telling but in the subtle, oblique way of ancient documents, which hint at and rarely describe, these were the pointers for me. Nature and culture interfold here. The whole place is an act of companionship across generations and species. It is a place to make good but not a place to make neat. Both it and you will sweat in it.

If I was to come to know the birds as I had resolved to do, this boundary condition was what to aim for and cultivate. The ideal was immersion.

Hollow Flemings, the self-rewilding field – perhaps the original Swetyngcroft – was the place. There is no view to speak of there. Resurgent nature is crowding back in. Young trees are proliferating in the brambles and up out of the bracken. This is where the nightingales had chosen to sing. If I was to learn about the birds, this was where I should base myself, away from any house, far from any road or disturbance, embedded in the edge country.

The tool was to be a shed in that forgotten field, a cabin with fold-down windows. It should be a small shelter, big enough to sleep in but little more, a birdhouse, a place for a day and a night, and a hide from which to see and hear the yearly show unfold. I did not want to observe the birds but to be with them. Not a gazebo or an observatory, to stare out from or to gaze at any view, but something closer and subtler than that, an absorbatory, a place to take it in, to dissolve, if such a thing is possible, the boundary between self and world.

There is nothing new about the idea of a shed as a revelatory place. Anything I made would, consciously or not, be a descendant of a long history of the shed as a way of encountering the world, not quite domestic and yet verging on domesticity, neither settled nor unsettled, out in nature but not of nature, poised between conditions. Every hut is a hide, an outer covering – it is no chance that we use the same word for the skin of a cow and a place of concealment: they have the same etymology – a shield and shelter, but one that is semi-permeable, a room into which the outside world could be allowed to enter as a welcome guest.

And so one autumn, I embarked on making a shed for Hollow Flemings. It was to be close up against the young trees, their branches no more than a foot and a half from the windows. It should be wooden and raised up on stilts, because being up in the trees feels more engaged with them. A tree, once you are among its leaves, is no longer an object but an environment. Where possible, the shed's materials – oak, chestnut, birch – should come from nearby. The windows should be wide and shallow so that nothing outside could see in – to see but not be seen; to hide – but they must be on all sides so that where the trees stepped away, there could be a longer look down into the valley. It needed a woodburner for winter days and early mornings. I thought at first bird feeders could hang off struts from the corners and drew a sketch from which my daughter draughted the rough idea of a woven-feeling building – she made it hexagonal, with a corrugated hemp roof. An engineer designed the foundations required to stop the whole structure sliding downhill. Tim Dee suggested that what we were all now calling the Bird House should become a birdhouse and that nest boxes could be incorporated into the walls, accessible to birds from outside through the usual openings, and visible from inside through glass behind small wooden doors. But if we were to have nest boxes, we shouldn't have feeders nearby, as the two need to be separate for the birds' safety.

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.