ROY Dennis is walking along a clifftop being dive-bombed by birds. It's like a scene from Alfred Hitchcock's The Birds, although a wave of his hand is enough to deter these feathered creatures from attack.

Later, on Bass Island, off the East Lothian coast, he gazes in amazement as gannets, thousands upon thousands of them, swirl about in the sky in such numbers they look like falling snowflakes.

This birdman of the BBC - Dennis is a wildlife conservationist - is a worried man. Our "greatest wildlife spectacular", in the summer when Britain plays host to eight million seabirds, is in danger. Many seabirds are in serious trouble, as some are failing to raise any young.

He returns to Fair Isle, where he lived for seven years in the 1960s, to see how puffins and guillemots are faring. Not too well. Like other birds, they're struggling to find enough food, so hungry these days that they're not fit enough to lay eggs or find enough food to feed chicks. This story is repeated with other bird species in other parts of the country.

There's a shortage of sand eels - one of their chief sources of food - and that has something to do with industrial sand eel harvesting. They're pulped and turned into food for pigs and farmed fish.

There needs to be a balance between what fisherman can catch and what's left for nature, he suggests. Climate change is contributing to food problems too. Warmer seas mean a change in the distribution of plankton, so sand eels go hungry. Dennis exhibited a handful of skinny ones, definitely size zero fish, which wouldn't provide much of a meal for anyone.

Birds of a different kind, usually topless and on page three, are associated with tabloids which, former Sun editor Kelvin Mackenzie reveals in A Tabloid Is Born, aren't a product of our generation but the Edwardians.

Broadsheets in the 1890s were boring, with column inches devoted to bishops and Parliament but nothing about people, what we call human stories. But Alfred Harmsworth, later Viscount Northcliffe, changed all that by launching the Daily Mail in 1896.

This "Napoleon of Fleet Steet" had his first taste of publishing at 15 when he edited the school newspaper. His first proper publishing venture was not a success. The oddly-titled Answers To Correspondents lost money, with poor sales blamed on heavy fog and Jack the Ripper roaming about.

The Mail contained stories that common folk, now being educated to read and write, were interested in. Tales of overworked barmaids and divorcing curates which were a world away from 50,000 word Parliamentary reports and court circulars.

This tabloid became a template for other newspapers and revolutionised pay for journalists (you could have fooled me). Readers wanted to be entertained as well as informed, Harmsworth figured. They wanted fun as well as facts.

The first editor was a tough, chain-smoking Glaswegian who was "a man driven by sensationalism" and believed that nothing sold better than a first-class murder.

During the Boer War, Harmsworth questioned government policy. When his star correspondent was captured on the way to Mafeking, he appointed the first female war correspondent - Lady Sarah Wilson, wife of a serving officer.

He also launched the Daily Mirror, which became noted for its photo journalism. Reporters concealed cameras in their hats to snap pictures in court at Dr Crippen's trial.

Most sensationally, the Mirror published a photograph of King Edward VII on his deathbed, selling two million copies of the paper that day. No complaint came from the Palace because Queen Alexandra consented to the picture being published, saying the Daily Mirror was her favourite paper.

Think of the outcry today if any paper dared print a picture of a dead royal.