Andy

Search and Rescue Helicopter pilot. Durham and Oxford University. Rower. Wildlife Artist of the Year Finalist 2024. Despise animal cruelty

[Andy @doyleysar]

Yey let’s GO my little Nuthatch! Wildlife Artist of the Year 2024 finalist. Wildlife isn’t far away. It’s just outside your window #WAY24 @DSWFWildlife

[LBC @LBC]

'When do you suppose Sir Keir will take the knee? And all the football players?'
'Don't hold your breath.'

@NickFerrariLBC reacts to the bodycam footage of Henry Nowak's death, and the 'day of shame' it's brought on Hampshire police.

[Andy @doyleysar]

Yup

[Aviation @xAviation]

A student pilot experiences his first fully developed spin during emergency maneuver training with an aerobatic instructor. Having only practiced incipient spins before, he entered the spin at 6,700 ft, started recovery at 4,500 feet using the Beggs-Mueller method, and leveled out safely at 3,200 ft.

📹: coryjeacocke

[Andy @doyleysar]

Me.

[Give A Shit About Nature @giveashitnature]

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.

[Aakash Gupta @aakashgupta]

Your brain has a circuit that doesn't know you live in a city. Its only job is to monitor whether birds are still singing. Right now, in this room, it is on.

The circuit predates primates. Mammals have been using ambient soundscape continuity as a predator-detection system for roughly 200 million years. Birds stop singing when something larger moves through their territory. For most of mammalian history, a forest full of song meant no large predator was nearby, and the cessation of sound was the warning. Your nervous system never updated this software.

The Max Planck Institute tested the inverse in 2022 with 295 participants. Six minutes of birdsong dropped anxiety with a medium effect size. Six minutes of traffic noise raised depression with the same. The effect worked on subjects who lived in dense urban environments and had no regular contact with nature. The brain still ran the check.

Birdsong sits in the 1,000 to 8,000 Hz range. Your brainstem reads continuous patterns in that band as a signal that nothing dangerous is currently moving through the environment. EEG data shows birdsong at 45 to 50 decibels boosts alpha wave activity by 14.1% relative to silence. Alpha is the brainwave signature of relaxed alertness. Push the same birdsong above 60 decibels and the response flips. Stress markers rise 29%. The circuit only trusts the signal at the volume of quiet conversation, which is exactly the volume birds sing at from a typical distance.

Three things happen simultaneously when the brain registers ambient safety. The amygdala downregulates. The parasympathetic nervous system takes over from the sympathetic. Heart rate variability rises, cortisol drops. The posterior cingulate cortex, which sits at the center of the rumination circuit, quiets down. King's College London tracked this through a smartphone study with over 1,200 participants and found the mood lift lasted hours after the sound stopped. People diagnosed with depression got the same response as healthy controls.

Most of what gets labeled mental fatigue is hypervigilance running in the background. Birdsong tells the circuit it can stand down, and the brain reallocates the freed compute everywhere else.

A quiet park feels different from a quiet office because the parks have sentinels.

[Andy @doyleysar]

@HelenWebberley Isn’t it.

[Andy @doyleysar]

When did we abandon basic common sense let alone science?

We are in a dark age of ideology.

[Andy @doyleysar]

@HelenWebberley They deserve better than the spotlight they now have because of ridiculous ideology. They just wasn’t to blend in and live but you are bringing them into the spotlight. They don’t want that.

[Andy @doyleysar]

@HelenWebberley What if I’ve engaged with the facts AND have concerns?

[Sama Hoole @SamaHoole]

A farmer dies in April 2026.

His son inherits the farm. The farm has been in the family since 1847.

The farm consists of: 300 acres of grazing pasture, a farmhouse built in 1892, a barn, a milking parlour, two tractors of varying ages, a Land Rover that runs about 70% of the time, and a herd of 180 Hereford-cross cattle.

On paper, the farm is worth approximately £3.2 million. This is because land near him has been bought recently by a London hedge fund looking for carbon credits, which has dragged the comparable value of every field within forty miles upward to a number nobody local can justify.

In cash, the farm produces a profit of about £28,000 a year in a good year. In a bad year it loses money. The son also works as a fencing contractor three days a week to keep the operation viable.

The inheritance tax bill on a £3.2 million estate, even at the reduced 20% rate, comes to approximately £140,000 after the increased threshold is applied. The son does not have £140,000. The son has never had £140,000. The son has £4,200 in his current account and an overdraft.

The son sells 60 acres to a developer to pay the tax. The developer puts solar panels on the 60 acres. The remaining herd cannot be sustained on the reduced land. The herd is sold. The barn becomes a holiday let.

A different family eats Brazilian beef this Christmas without knowing why the price went up.

The Treasury collects £140,000.

The land never produces British food again.

[Andy @doyleysar]

@HelenWebberley An unbiased viewpoint without any skin in the game or making any profit from it. Disregard anyone who is desperately trying to retain their entrenched views even as the evidence mounts.

[Andy @doyleysar]

@HelenWebberley @MaeveHalligan @BuckAngel You are single-handedly doing more to harm the trans issue than any other person.

[Andy @doyleysar]

@HelenWebberley @MaeveHalligan @PiersUncensored I think @MaeveHalligan is doing precisely that.

[Andy @doyleysar]

@hitchrogers @RichardDawkins Trust facts. Not feelings.

[Andy @doyleysar]

@HelenWebberley So how can children make life changing decisions if their brains are not fully developed to allow this deep thinking?

[Andy @doyleysar]

Crazy

[OSINTtechnical @Osinttechnical]

Footage of the mid air collision between a pair of Navy Super Hornets/Growlers during the Gunfighter Skies Air Show at Mountain Home Air Force Base moments ago.

[Andy @doyleysar]

@HelenWebberley I don’t think anyone thinks like that Helen. I know a few trans people and they are lovely. The question is about kids, and the scale of it now, and about what we consider normal. If we were a lot more tolerant as to what is normal (nothing is) then this debate looks different.

[Andy @doyleysar]

@otboae @bluebirdk7 Nonsense. And this tweet shows why Bill is frozen out, quite rightly. Disgusting and offensive.

[Andy @doyleysar]

@DaveWCurrie 🤣🤣🤣

[Andy @doyleysar]

Home.

[Andy Burnham @AndyBurnhamGM]

@andrewlawrence London and Boston Marathons, lad.

Check it out. 💪🏻