A bricklayer in East Yorkshire has spent 35 years putting up barn owl nest boxes on weekends. This year, the region saw 308 owlets hatch.
His name is Robert Salter. He's 56 and does bricklaying full time. In 1990, he saw a piece on the news about a man in Lincolnshire installing barn owl boxes, and decided he'd do the same. He started with five.
He now has more than 350 boxes scattered across fields, farms, outbuildings, and trees in East Yorkshire. Every June, he takes four weeks off from bricklaying and visits them with his wife Sue. Scrambling up ladders, ringing chicks, cleaning boxes, repairing the ones the weather got to. He's a licensed bird ringer for the British Trust for Ornithology.
In 2024, the region ringed 95 owlets. In 2025, the count was 308. The Barn Owl Trust says that nationally, this year was "pretty poor" for barn owl breeding, but east Yorkshire is the exception, and it's the exception because of one man with a ladder.
The barn owl population in the UK was estimated at 4,000 pairs in the mid-2000s and crashed to roughly 1,000 by the early 2010s. The species is still recovering.
Most of conservation is one person who refuses to give up.
Appalled to see that Romania's Eurovision entry is a very catchy BDSM themed song called "Choke Me!".
The staging includes ligatures as the singer implores "I need you to choke me".
Normalising & celebrating sexual violence against women. Parents be aware. 😡
🚨 The impeccable and historic Italian 🇮🇹 maison Gucci somehow managed to send Demi Moore onto the Cannes Film Festival red carpet dressed like a crumpled napkin abandoned on the table after Christmas dinner
The result is quite literally a disaster
Say what you will about this style of building, but if I asked an architect to design the most defensible council house possible for a zombie apocalypse, they could hardly do better.
I have the biggest and best bill. It’s a beautiful bill. There’s never been a better bill. It makes me proud. The best bill in the world. Everybody admires my bill. Bet you didn’t know that. Nobody would’ve believed it. 😆
Not just the NHS - digital exclusion is everywhere denying access to almost everything.
It’s unacceptable, discriminatory and unfair.
Been concerned about this for more than a decade.
Vulnerable paying for services/help entitled to - denied access.
Disgraceful & dangerous!
I tweeted about digital exclusion and how older people (and people with brain injuries & disabilities) are locked out of healthcare services because of multiple complicated apps. This is one of the demands on my mum’s GP app. She has no idea how to film & upload her face.
Britain is home to almost half of the world’s bluebells, found in ancient or semi-natural woodlands, flowering in April and May. 'Bluebell woods' by contemporary UK painter Susan Entwistle #WomensArt