The Independent reports that some species of insects and invertebrates have declined by more than 80% in recent decades.

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Imagine the scene: a beautiful sunny Autumn day on the banks of the canal in Castlefield, golden leaves rustling above my head.

I sit down on a bench, lift my Greggs chargrilled chicken sandwich out of the paper bag and suddenly I’m surrounded by three large geese. One of which keeps running up to me, trying to get at my sandwich.

I get the impression that this bird knows exactly what tactics are most likely to get a result. He’s large, really quite intimidating and at one point I retreat behind the bench. But eventually I realise that I can keep him at bay by stretching out my legs. So I sit down again. Actually he’s not that bad after all. Quite cute.

But what’s this? Sudden a ‘honking’ sound in the distance. Two really big swans arrive, leap out of the water, wings open and run towards me. They could probably break your wrist with a peck, so I leap behind the bench again. Much to the amusement of some people who are passing safely on the other side of the canal.

Eventually the swans give up and take to the water again. One flaps its huge wings and they sail off into the distance.

Take my advice, if you’re thinking of relaxing with a sandwich, stick to Piccadilly Gardens…

I just managed to catch the young swallows leaving the nest on the BBC Springwatch live webcam. Cute.

It was a great show this year, especially the ‘Nightshift’ infrared cameras after midnight, which have regularly featured the antics of badgers. It has had better viewing figures than the Big Brother live feed. I hope the late show will be back next year.

All of which is a good excuse to show my photo of swallows yet again!

I would love to rig up a live camera one year.

Excited to see a red squirrel in the garden this morning. It was being chased by more than a dozen sparrows. They have made the overgrown clematis their base and I expect they saw the squirrel as a predator.

From 30th September to 8th October 2006 it’s Red Squirrel Week. This one was nine days early!

Northumberland is one of the last strongholds for the red squirrel, which has been driven out of most of England over the past 100 years by the grey squirrel.

These stills are from some video that will be up on the site in a few days as part of a longer film.

More about red squirrels:

Red Alert

BBC Radio 4

Northumberland National Park

You can download the MP4 version here (iPod compatible).

I had an eventful five hour walk this afternoon. This is a short extract from a much longer video that I’ll be making about it.

I’m laughing about this but, with a calf on the track ahead of me, I wasn’t sure whether angry mum and dad and all their friends might be able to get out the field if they reached the corner before me.

There have been a few cases of walkers being trampled to death by cattle. Especially when there are calves: BBC report.

(Peter says: ‘get back to the city centre!’)

One of the things you notice when you come from Manchester city centre to a small village out in the country is the birdlife.

Sure we have magpies, pigeons, starlings and even parrots where I live in Manchester. But here there is just so much more variety and so many of them: swifts, swallows, thrushes, blackbirds, finches, wrens, occasionally geese and birds of prey and, unlike some parts of Britain, there is no shortage of sparrows here. All of these can be seen from the house. Recently I posted a video of a woodpecker that was outside my window.

When I lived here fulltime I had two cats and there were many others in the neighbourhood, with inevitable consequences. Now there are no cats and the birds are thriving. But it can still be harsh at times.

Last year I was watching a beautiful thrush hopping about on the lawn. An hour later I found it dead. It had either choked to death on something (a slug pellet from one of the other gardens?) or maybe it had just happened to drop dead for some reason.

I arrived to find the swallows nesting in the passageway between the houses, as they have done for decades. I could see three or four little beaks peeking over the edge of the nest and they were a few days from fledging. One year I got this great shot of them just after they left the nest.

Sad to say, last week, I found all the chicks dead on the ground below. I don’t know what happened. There was no sign of any damage to the nest. But we did have workmen outside the house cutting up the pavement with one of those noisy saws. I wonder if that kept the parent birds away and when they returned the baby birds were dead, so the parents threw them out of the nest?

Nature can be tough. I’m starting to feel like the vet in The League of Gentlemen!

Download MP4 version here

Currently I’m in a little village near the England/Scotland border.

At 6am on Friday morning there seemed to be a lot of bird noise outside the window. I looked out and saw a crowd of sparrows and a male great spotted woodpecker (I know that because I looked it up on the RSPB website)

The first woodpecker I’ve seen in real-life. I was rather excited. The window has that old-fashioned glass, which is why the video is a bit blurred.