The elderflowers have almost all gone and blackberries are turning from green to purple. I've also noticed the conkers forming on the trees along Hackney's Upper Clapton Road.

While the elderflowers and conkers are roughly sticking to the traditional seasonal pattern, the blackberries seem to get ever earlier. This week temperatures are due to touch the mid-thirties and last Saturday's rain storm was reminiscent…

Mention of a swift half usually brings a chorus of assent, but news that swift numbers have dropped almost half has been recieved with groans of dismay.

Why should we care? Well, apart from the fact that these birds are absolutely bloody amazing, we should consider that they gobble up bugs flying and floating in the air, such as mosquitoes and spiders.They can eat some five hundred insects an hour when supporting young…

The Met Office has been busy predicting the future - up to 2099.

Not the cross my palm with silver, you will have a long happy life sort of prediction. The weather sort. It's a double-edged sword of a prediction that follows the forewarned is forearmed theory. Full details have not yet been released but the summary I've seen warns of unbearably hot summers in London (41C or 105F), failing food crops around the Capital…

Make your nature count! I've been so busy telling everyone else about this new summer survey that I've not found time to do it myself. Until now.

I've been rummaging trying to find a toad that I know I've got in the garden somewhere. I appear to have mislaid him. Hopefully the fox cubs from the end of the garden haven't found him already and gobbled him up.

He was helping to keep the slugs down. I've…

One out every five UK birds are red listed! That rate is far higher than the known number of threatened MP's!

52 different bird species, including common London birds like house sparrows, starlings, the cuckoo, herring gull, lapwing and yellowhammer are now red listed! The newly updated Birds of Conservation Concern contains good news too. It shows that where our research found the source of some birds declines, we…