and, on the hour, it plays the appropriate birdsong.

The cats HATE it :-)

but I remember an old job I had working in Highgate Cemetery. I was with a young kid who was absolutely brilliant at identifying different bird sounds, to my untrained ears anyway. I was amazed at the time and still am now. I love the sound of birds, though the family cat rendered the garden as pretty much a no-fly zone and I hope now we won't be having to go to zoos or sanctuaries to see native birds. BTW do read Mark Croker's Crow Country; a brilliantly written book about crows - he does writes very well.

a farmer near near where we live (south staffordshire)went organic, set aside, stewardship scheme etc a few years ago and the birds came back. He replanted hedgerows and began coppicing some woodland. Tree sparrows, yellowhammers, lapwings, barn owl etc. I was near there last weekend and there was a huge flock of starlings.There is hope. The concern is how long he can afford to keep it up.

On the doom and gloom side...global warming. I know it's been debated here before but how and why do people still stick their head in the sand?

I almost kissed it I was so pleased to see it. I just about remember the summer of 1976 when there were millions of them everywhere one looked.

I saw about ten or fifteen waxwings in a some lime trees near my office the other day. Not that many for a bird that can flock hundreds strong, but it transformed my afternoon.

I'm no life-listing twitcher, but over the past few years I've tried building up some knowledge of which bird is which, even trying to recognise calls of your more common-or-garden variety. There is a joy - grown-up, reflective, calm, rooted joy - to be found in the simplicity of paying a little more attention to the every day and you can't get more quotidian than garden birds. Gradually, you discover complexity and wonder where before there was just a bunch of little brown jobs whizzing over your fence or hopping about in the park.

Read Simon Barnes's Bad Birdwatcher. He's better at articulating this than I am.

Many thanks Con, the series of Bird Britannia obtained an emotional response from me I could not have predicted. I feel I was blind to the bird world and now I must attempt to open my eyes. Lets be blunt, the bird watching community does suffer some ridicule. But stuff em I say, their right and the smirkers are wrong. Book suitably ordered.