Nightingales stop housing development

♦ An estate of “floating” homes designed to alleviate flooding has been refused planning permission over fears it will wipe out nightingales.

The birds were once common across the UK but are now clinging on in just a few isolated pockets of woodland, mainly in the Thames Valley, Kent and East Anglia, and their numbers are dwindling fast.

The scheme for an estate of homes perched high on stilts above the water on a lake at Theale, near Reading, one of the birds’ last strongholds, would help drive them to extinction in Britain, nature lovers protested.