• Your country needs you ... to garden for wildlife

    I can hear the jays, I've seen the blackbirds pecking the food scraps on the bird table, seen chaffinch on the hawthorn and watched swifts overhead, but house sparrows and tits are still conspicuous by their absence from my urban garden.

    It's not much at present, we only recently moved in but there are big plans to create a wildlife haven in my patch of inner London. My old home only had an overshadowed concrete…

  • Who's your Daddy?

    Okay, you're alone at home, minding your own business and happen to look out the window where you are shocked to see the beady, sparkling eye of a foot-tall bird of prey, its feathers ruffled by the wind, its sharp talons twisted round the metalwork of the balcony - it's a peregrine!

    This is exactly what happened to Peter Kenyon, who lives in central London close to our Aren't birds brilliant! Peregrine watch…

  • Houdini escapes and children caught red-handed

    Last year, while we were all busy talking to people about the peregrines that perch on the Tate Modern's chimney, a pair of heavily made-up, dark clad Goths having a romantic picnic behind our trailer were interupted by one of the birds hungrily snatching a pigeon right in front of them! Of course we, armed with telescopes, cameras and binoculars, completely missed it.

    On Friday I stopped off on the South Bank on…

  • Give us the bill and a bird as charismatic as George Melly

    Sometimes bizarre coincidences do happen and this week bore witness to one. Our RSPB Croydon local group has just published a new book on the history and recording of birds in the London borough. Flicking through I came across three bizarre recordings of puffins.

    As it happens, the puffin is the charismatic bird choosen as the model for a giant inflatable we'll be taking to the House of Commons this week as part our campaign…

  • Bombs, newts and awards - another London week

    July started wet and breezy, but despite security alerts and severe weather warnings we rolled on with a great stall at London Pride in Trafalgar Square and our Wild in the Parks team, supported by volunteers, created a giant earth sculpture, using twenty tonnes of soil!

    The earth sculpture was designed by members of the Chinese National Healthy Living Centre who opted to create a giant newt five metres long! It will be…