Blue is the colour, not the mood. We've a carnival spirit as we prepare to gather for The Wave, a demonstration of public feeling for action addressing the threat of climate change.

Yes, I do believe humankind's actions are driving our climate ever faster towards a critical moment where the balance will be tipped against life as we know it. The recent media circus around the emails from climate scientists is a distraction…

The noise from the traffic on the busy Marylebone Road was still thrumming in my ears as I strode up York Bridge towards the Inner Circle of Regent's Park. I was approaching the we created in partnership with The Royal Parks when I was stopped in my tracks. Here in the shadow of the BT Tower, was a jay, staring at me from the hedge.

Jays are suposedly elusive, shy birds of woodland. Yet here it was loud and proud…

Cor blimey missus, look at the antlers on that!

Bushy Park in west London is where my partners Gran courted, and rumour has it, may well have conceived my Mother-in-law.. don't anyone tell her I mentioned it else Christmas dinner will be a frosty affair.

Bushy's in Richmond, just a stone's throw geographically speaking from Central London. For me, living in east London, it seems a long way these days, taking at…

My jays have been busy burying acorns in our garden.

It's said that jays remember the location of evey nut they bury. They're smart, but not normally thought of as tame birds. If you wander through St James's Park of a morning you'll often see a man waiting for someone to spot him. Once he knows he's got an audience, he whistles and along come a couple of jays to sit on his hand to be fed. Is it learned behaviour…

If you've ever set out to see a kingfisher, the chances are you've returned home disappointed.

I hopped on London's Northern Line to Gospel Oak to work at our Date with Nature on Hampstead Heath with no expectations for the day what so ever. What a day it proved to be. There were the usual but wonderful suspects; cormorants, tufted ducks, coots, moorhens, starlings, crows, swans, mallard and of course p…

They say it's not over until the fat lady sings.. well in nature, it will be all over if the fat lady [robin] doesn't sing.

Feed the Birds weekend has passed but it's not a one off activity, the weekend's a reminder to continue to put out food for garden birds all through the winter.

What we're saying is, if you don't feed your garden birds to help them keep warm, they'll freeze to death. There are no…

My daughter's 'music' homework was all about the blues. She just wouldn't believe me when I said the godfather of the blues is a gravelly voiced chap called Muddy Waters.

"What sort of name is that," she asked. "It's as sensible and clear as most," I responded, glancing at the names on a magazine in front of me: Chenille, BB, Missy P, Axel and Wolf!

This exchange came back to me…

My Aunty Joyce is forever linked with goldcrests in my mind now. On Monday I joined relatives to bid her farewell at Birmingham's Robin Hood Cemetery. Afterwards we gathered in a nearby hotel and there in the late October sunshine, two of these gorgeous little birds played hide-and-seek in the top of a conifer. It's a nice way to remember someone.

Back at work my thoughts are turning to our annual Feed the Bi…

"It's not a cull!" Exasperated yelling in my dreams is not something I'd normally share; it reveals too much. But I've been forced to repeat those five little words so many times this past week, the phrase has obviously embedded itself in my subconcious.

Natural England has shifted ring-necked parakeets on to the general licence, along with Canada geese, Egyptian geese and monk parakeets. They join c…

Actually not all the leaves are brown, but they're not far off it. My garden birds don't seem too perturbed so I'm taking their lack of interest in my seed feeders as evidence that they don't yet think the tim'e right to fatten up ready for the cold, dark winter. I'm putting the leaf-fall down to the drier than average summer rather than an early autumn.

I've done all those annual maintenance jobs…

London, to many, is the never ending rumble and roar of planes, trains and road traffic. To me, these are the bass notes that underscore the chattering high notes of sparrows, the caw-caw of rooks and magpies; the rat-a-tats of woodepeckers and the chirping of robins. At home the symphony has the added coughing of squirrels punctuated at night by the rare bark of a fox.

All sorts of critters share London's dynamic spaces…

Wellies, pop-up tents, skaggy jeans and portaloos are not not really my thing, but I've just enjoyed a weekend of festivals.

Saturday, I journeyed far to the east of London. Well, just near Ipswich. It was for Harvest at Jimmy's. It's not hardcore festival, more a music and food funtime for families. Badly Drawn Boy was angrily performing on stage and I really enjoyed Jon Allen, he just needs a big hug.…

With some apprehension I'm sitting waiting to have a trapped nerve resolved by an Osteopath and, looking from the clinic window I spot two peregrines.

The pair I've just spotted are plastic decoys on a roof in Hackney's Broadway Market. Presumably put there to scare off pigeons. I seem to come across peregrines wherever I go. On my hols my children, partner and me marvelled at a pair of peregrines at Cheddar…

A sparrow. I saw a sparrow in my garden. I'm amazed and delighted. If you're wondering why the sight of a small, brown and rather common garden bird should get me in such a feverish state... consider the fact that I have NEVER seen a sparrow in my garden since we moved in almost four years ago. They are vanishing.

My garden is not exactly green, nor is it large. It's better than it was, but I have yet to lift…

August already and to hammer home the point of time flying, the swifts that have been screaming, ducking and diving over my home... have gone. Hopefully they'll be back from their African wintering grounds next year.

I've cleaned out the swift box I had fixed to my wall. It was used by a family of tits, who left behind a soft mossy mass with a base of twigs and plenty of animal hair. There was one un-hatched…

How cool are we! Leonardo DiCaprio dropped in to our peregrine watch at the Tate Modern the other day. After viewing the birds on the chimney through our scopes, chatting with our volunteers and signing our Birds of Prey petition, he bought a couple of our soft toy calling peregrines before vanishing along the Southbank.

Our peregrine watch has also welcomed another three special visitors. Jasper den Dulk, his sister Beatrix…

£2.99 for 175g, the blackberries in my supermarket. The hedgerows round Hackney are now groaning under the weight of some of the juiciest, plumpest blackberries I've seen in years. Yet people will pay two-pence a gram for something they could harvest for free.

Lucky for me, this ripening comes just as the schools break-up, so I've got plenty of help from my daughters to take full advantage of nature's bounty…

Forget soft and fluffy, think the terminator of pigeons on wings.

There'll be no explosions, except for the odd puff of feathers from their lunch, but we could have high speed chases. It's our Date at the Tate running through-out the school holidays.

We'll bring you real life action, drama, passion and blood-lust aplenty. Join us to see a pair of the world's fastest creatures, and maybe, a couple of their off…

Sun bathing blackbirds are a thing to behold. The first time I saw one, I thought I was looking at a nesting moorhen with a chick under each wing. A second, closer, look revealed it for a puffed out blackbird with fully extended wings and fanned tail feathers.

So why do blackbirds sunbathe? I don't know, but there are a few theories. First and most obvious is that they like it. Second, they do it to maintain body temperature…

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…

I'm constantly amazed and hugely impressed by the work people put in to their community spaces around London. It puts my own garden efforts to shame.

In the last week I've visited an inspiring allotment site where the imagination of the allotment holders add magic to what had once been a brownfield site. It's now full of wildlife, flowers, fruit and veg. I also heard about a community who lost their orchard…