Bellamy has come under lots of criticism for his controversial views on climate change – he’s said previously that he doesn’t believe in man-made global warming, and that glaciers are actually advancing, not retreating.

I certainly don’t agree with him on this, but the Green Weekend was more about getting holidaymakers to spot birds and creepycrawlies so I didn’t like to bring it up. And the kids bloody loved him.

While we were chatting about wildlife, one of the main issues he described was way in which conifers have radically changed the British landscape and its biological make-up.

I was aware that conifers are not native to the UK, but hadn’t really appreciated how they came to be here and the threat they pose to our ecosystems, so I did a bit more research.

Apparently, just after the First World War, whole swathes of native woodland were chopped down to replace it with quick-growing conifers like the Sitka spruce from North America. We needed a ready supply of wooden pit props for use in coal-mining; at one point during the war, we’d almost run out of them and couldn’t import them because of the German blockade, and we couldn’t take that same risk again. So the Forestry Commission was set up, and quickly set about intensive tree farming of monoculture conifers.

The Independent’s Michael McCarthy says:

Over the hills of England, Wales and Scotland the great austere blocks of huddled conifers began to spread, 150,000 hectares by 1939, and then at a gathering pace after the Second World War: 310,000 hectares in the Fifties, 365,000 hectares in the Sixties. No matter that nobody liked it. No matter that much of our ancient broadleaved woodland, its value unrecognised, was being cut down at the same time. No matter that sites of beauty and conservation value were being swamped. The dark monoculture advanced remorselessly, until by 1980 the woodland cover of Britain, which in 1919 had been the lowest of any major European country, at less than 5% of the land, had doubled to over two million hectares.

The impact of this (apart from them looking so dark and ominous compared to our native broadleaved forests) is that it changed habitats for wildlife. Conifers don’t let light through to the forest floor. They have also been blamed for acidifying water - making some lakes and rivers un-liveable for fish.

David Bellamy’s answer is to cut down all the conifers and transform our landscape back to how it was a few thousand years ago; I’m not sure the Christmas tree industry would be too pleased.

He also emphasised how radically agriculture has changed the UK landscape. “All the best land is covered with cereals now – that’s why we don’t see bees and butterflies anymore,” he explained.

We also had a good discussion  about the need to get more young people into countryside careers. “Young people don’t know about or don’t want to be farmers and gamekeepers anymore,” he said.

Agriculture was certainly never on my radar as a potential career-path, and I can’t remember a single classmate for whom it was. The growth in sales of locally-sourced produce in the UK is enouraging, but with the number of young people going into agriculture on the decline, who’s going to grow it all? I’ll sit and eat my onions from Lincolnshire and spinach from Kent quite happily – but would I be happy to get out there and do the hard work?

David’s suggestion is some kind of national eco-service: “If I were prime minister, I’d make every child between school and university go and work in the countryside and learn how to look after it”, he says.

One of the six tennets of the RSPB’s ‘Letter To The Future” campaign is for the government to commit more money to getting school children out of the classroom and into the countryside and nature reserves to experience wildlife for themselves.

If so few young people are even familiar with the countryside, we  can’t be surprised if they don’t consider working in it to be a feasible career choice.

There are several wildlife-identifying ones which might have come in handy on my Big Garden Birdwatch a few weeks back. There’s one called Pollution which tells you how badly the air around you right now is polluted. Adam also recommends GoodGuide – a buyer’s guide along the lines of Ethical Consumer. You can even scan in barcodes while you’re shopping to find out a product’s environmental and social credentials but I’ve scanned everything in my kitchen cupboards to no avail – it’s very US-centric at the moment.

However the app I got most excited about was a free-of-charge app called Skeptical Science. It arms you with a whole list of climate change sceptics’ arguments – and the scientific rebuttal of them. There are 28 arguments under the subheading ‘It’s Not Happening’; 54 under ‘It’s Not Us’; and 6 under ‘It’s Not Bad’.

I wish I’d had this app a couple of weeks back when my friend Dave came round for dinner. He befuddled me with talk of ‘sunspots’ being the possible cause of global warming as opposed to CO2 emissions. I knew this couldn’t be right but I hadn’t read much about this particular argument so I didn’t have much of a come-back.

But with a few taps on my iPhone, this new app gives me a link to the sceptics’ argument in action (in this case, a BBC story  on the sun being hotter now than it has been for the last 1,000 years), and then the scientific counter-argument, a lovely graph, and a whole list of studies and experts which refute the sunspot theory.

Simples!

Down on Pond 10, we mostly kept the telescopes trained on a heron, and four cormorants sitting one on each corner of a jetty in the middle of the pond. There were also heaps of coots which spent most of the day having wing-flapping fights and trying to drown each other – hilarious to watch.

Over the course of the weekend, all the species spotted by the team or the public were recorded on a whiteboard, and we clocked up a massive list, including tufted ducks, ring-necked parakeets, gulls, tits, moorhens and even a red kite.

Hamish also found a tiny freshwater crayfish at the edge of the pond – an invasive species rather than a native one sadly but interesting nonetheless.

Up in the tent, we talked to people about becoming a member and about next weekend’s Big Garden Birdwatch.

I was in charge of the craft activity – making bird-feeders from apples, sunflower seeds and a piece of string which went down very well with the kids (and a few adults determined to have a go.)

Jess and Lyndon recruited a rather splendid six new members, and lots of people stopped to chat – including one familiar looking guy who we later confirmed as singer David Gray! A big bird fan it seems.

We also had a possible sighting of author Martin Amis but he didn’t slow down long enough for a positive identification…..

Locals told us if we’d been a bit earlier we might have seen the legendary Bill Oddie, who lives nearby and is often out on the Heath in the morning by all accounts.

A brilliant way to spend my Sunday – can’t wait for the Big Garden Birdwatch now!

Hope you’ve got your hour set aside to see what you can see in your own garden or local park….

Final stats for my day on the Heath:

• Herons: 1
• Cormorants: 4
• Celebrities: 1 (possibly 2)
• Chocolate Biscuits: approx 18 (half a large packet of choc digestives)