QueSeraSarah 🎶🐦‍⬛

Swallow in Nosterfield,those tail streamers are very impressive.@NosterfieldLNR @HanbyAndrew @nybirdnews @HarrogateNats

21st April 2026 05.59

@KeruboSk My Granny was born in 1884, died when I was 9 and I’m now 66. We had great conversations while we had the chance. When she was a little girl she remembered the first bicycle in their village. Just before she died we both marvelled at the men walking on the moon! What a life!

Just out of curiosity… who out there has actually talked to someone born in the 1800s during their lifetime?

Don’t know her, but she made me cry.

Vegans: "Drinking cow's milk is unnatural!" Great point. So instead of pulling on some teats for thirty seconds, we've developed a twelve-step industrial alternative. Step one: grow almonds in California, a drought-afflicted state currently depleting an aquifer that took twenty thousand years to fill. Step two: ship them to a processing facility. Step three: soak them in water. California water, specifically, because almonds need 15 gallons per ounce and California is already rationing. Step four: pulverise them into a slurry. Step five: filter the slurry through fine mesh, discarding most of the actual almond in the process. That was the bit with the nutrition in it. Gone now. Step six: add more water, because the resulting liquid isn't watery enough. Step seven: add sweeteners, because it tastes of nothing. Step eight: add emulsifiers, because it separates in six minutes otherwise. Step nine: add synthetic vitamins, because all the natural ones left in step five. Step ten: add seed oils, because we apparently learned nothing. Step eleven: homogenise, degas, pasteurise, and sterilise the mixture until it resembles no food that has ever existed in nature. Step twelve: put it in a carton with a picture of a field on it. The cow: stands in a field. Makes milk. Has done this for ten thousand years. No factory. No steps. No aquifer. Unnatural, though. Very unnatural.

Today’s helping of Brompton’s cocktail from The Times !

@JRfromStrickley Excellent!

April 2020 to April 2026 This is land that we bought 8 yr ago, the hedges were in an awful state, so we reshaped the hedge bank, coppiced off the few stocks that were growing, then planted a mix of hawthorn, hazel, blackthorn & holly, plus oak & hornbeam trees. Reet grand eh 😊

James Burke really is in a different league …

A bricklayer in East Yorkshire has spent 35 years installing nest boxes for barn owls in his free time. No grant. No organization behind him. Just Robert Salter, quietly building and mounting over 350 boxes across fields and farms on weekends, before and after work, for three and a half decades. This year was the second-best barn owl breeding season in the region in decades. 304 owlets counted. Last year there were 95. Barn owls have struggled across the UK for generations due to habitat loss, rodenticide poisoning, starvation from agricultural changes that eliminated the field margins where voles live, and collisions with vehicles on roads that cut through their hunting territory. In many parts of England, populations collapsed while nobody was paying much attention. One man paying attention changed the outcome for an entire region. "This bird has lived alongside humans since they settled in this country," Salter told the BBC. "Because of that close relationship, I just feel like we owe it to barn owls to help and maintain their future populations." The conservation story we usually tell involves governments, legislation, and international agreements. Those matter, but so does one person who decided a species deserved better and just kept showing up.

A panel in York’s St. William window (1405–08) by John Thornton - shows a man healed after being hit by a falling stone. This stone, found in a ditch near the deanery in 1867, reads: “Which fell on the head of Roger of Ripon.” It might once have been displayed at St. William's shrine.

@GroomB Poor Simon - in 1983?! What were we, savages?

‘Simon Being Taken out to Sea for the First Time since His Father Drowned’, Skinningrove, North Yorkshire, in 1983 by Chris Killip. Weekly ritual to prevent him becoming afraid of the sea, where the community earned its living.

An observation test for your inner 8-year-old. Can you spot 12 deliberate mistakes? From Treasure magazine, 1965 Official answers coming soon (Even if you don’t reply, could you please ‘like’ or share this one?)

As a GP brought up in the sanity of 1970’s Newcastle , I carried around in my wallet the recipe for Brampton’s cocktail. Good GPs were their patients! Friends when it came to end of life care; the now coming up to 80 next year I wish I still had the recipe to hand ! Help anybody?

@Jane919448002 @Johnrashton47 Nursing in Leeds in 1978, many deaths were eased by the Brompton cocktail and quite liberal prescriptions of whisky, brandy and sherry were normal. A recent stay in a cardiology ward has reminded me that the past is a foreign country; they do things differently there

@Johnrashton47 I started my nurse training in 1980, I remember Brompton cocktails for end of life patients and some patients were also prescribed a shot if whisky, brandy or sherry at nighttime instead of sleeping pills, or a Guinness or sherry to stimulate a poor appetite. Why not.

Common Sandpiper on the reserve.@NosterfieldLNR @HanbyAndrew @nybirdnews @HarrogateNats

16th April 2026 06.02

Beautiful summer plumage Black-Tailed Godwit on the reserve.@NosterfieldLNR @HanbyAndrew @nybirdnews @HarrogateNats

15th April 2026 20.02

Guess who's back. Thank you so much to Josh and Glen Annison for letting me know that the Orcas are back and a massive thank you to Josh for the video. They think there is between 8 to 10 Orcas feeding. @NorthEastTweets @VisitNland

14th April 2026 06.07