When I saw the photo, I thought surely this must be the smallest frog in the world?

Au contraire – it’s only the smallest species discovered in the OLD world .

They’ve found even smaller ones in Brazil and Cuba, though there seems to be some confusion over whether the Brazilian Gold Frog (Brachycephalus didactylus) or Cuba’s Monte Iberia Eleuth (Eleutherodactylus iberia) is the smallest.

Here are pictures of them both, anyhow:

The researchers are out in Borneo searching for the world’s lost amphibians as part of a campaign organized by Conservation International and IUCN’s Amphibians Specialist Group.

It’s worth checking out CI’s Search For the Lost Frogs page if you have a minute….

There’s a special photo group set up on Flickr for you to upload your own frog photos, and I’ve just uploaded a pic I took in Le Perinet rainforest in Madagascar…maybe someone will identify it for me!

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.

Despite a thorough explanation from instructor Derek on how to hold my paddle and how to slow down and change direction, I was still concerned about losing control and smashing up my kayak on the rocks. But Derek assured me the kayaks were practically indestructible. “You might hit into each other, though – the kayaks have got magnets in them,” he warned us.

I’d have thought magnets would make the kayaks heavier and slower, but didn’t like to question it; Derek Hairon is a sea-kayaking expert and wrote the world’s first book on the subject. His company, Jersey Kayak Adventures, has been guiding trips around Jersey’s rugged coast and nearby islands since 2004.

As we navigated through narrow gaps between rocks, I bumped apologetically into my fellow kayakers a few times but nobody seemed to mind. It seemed the magnets in my kayak were particularly strong.

The sea-level in Jersey rises and falls by up to 12 metres each tide, meaning you see different things each time you go out. Travelling by sea-kayak also means accessing whole stretches of the coast you never could on foot. Derek pointed out various bird species, and told us about Jersey’s natural history and geology as we paddled.

It was only as we peeled off our wetsuits at the end that Derek finally admitted he’d been pulling my leg about the magnets. I sensed I hadn’t been the first to fall for it.

But while he might joke about kayak magnetism, one thing Jersey Kayak Adventures takes very seriously is its environmental impact. Kayakers get a discount if they use public transport, and are encouraged to pick up any litter they spot and to drink from refillable bicycle bottles rather than buying bottled water.

There are other companies on Jersey that have shown a similar commitment. Jersey was the first destination in the world to gain Green Globe accreditation, and many hotels and attractions are signed up to the Green Tourism Business Scheme (GTBS).

La Mare Wine Estate is the only Gold award holder on the island, with eco-measures such as using discarded cooking oil as bio-fuel for the mini-bus and giving visitors a 5% discount if they use public transport to reach the estate. Jersey is on the same latitude as the Champagne region of France, so it enjoys an excellent grape-growing climate. La Mare produces not just award-winning wines but also cider, apple brandy, its own range of chocolates and to-die-for preserves.

Animal magic

Durrell Wildlife Conservation Trust, founded by author and naturalist Gerald Durrell, holds a silver GTBS award. The Trust is involved in species conservation projects around the world, and “zoo” is something of a dirty word. Species at the centre include Andean bears, lemurs, tamarin monkeys and gorillas – you may remember TV footage from 1986 when a toddler fell into Durrell’s gorilla enclosure and the silverback sat next to the unconscious body to protect the boy from the other gorillas.

I went behind-the-scenes with a keeper to help prepare food for the family of seven orangutans. The wheelbarrow of shiny onions, leeks and cucumbers grown in Durrell’s own garden looked more like the Best In Show at a village fete than the scraps I’d imagined the animals might get. And it put me in the mind to try some local Jersey produce for myself…

Suma’s, the less formal sister restaurant to Longueville Manor hotel, is located on the waterfront in Gorey, overlooking the iconic Mont Orgueil Castle. I was spoilt for choice with brill, seabass, Royal Bay oysters, lobster and scallops caught off the very coast I’d explored by kayak the day before. Jersey asparagus and a bowl of the first Jersey Royals of the season were also mandatory.

In the last few years, the island’s cuisine has become an important selling point, and it is proud of its two Michelin stars and many AA rosettes. Marco Pierre White is to open a restaurant on St Helier’s waterfront next year, and the tourist board has recently tied up with Jamie Oliver’s Fifteen. Jamie’s trainee chefs flew to Jersey to learn about oyster farming and growing potatoes, and Jersey produce was then featured on the menu in the London restaurant.

The island’s culinary kudos, coupled with an expanding choice of adventure sports and events, is helping draw a new generation of holidaymakers. “Jersey is attracting a younger crowd now, and short breaks are growing fast,” says Premier Holidays marketing manager Emma Coteman.

This summer in particular, the ash cloud and British Airways crises have raised the profile of any destination easily reached by ferry instead of flying. “Once people experience Jersey and how much there is to see and do, they get drawn back again and again,” adds Emma.

I wonder if it might be something to do with those magnets?

I knew about the impact elephants can have, tearing down vegetation.

I’ve read about the impact of cattle and invasive species like cane toads and crown-of-thorns starfish too.

But it was news to me that the common carp is also a bad guy! Apparently they uproot vegetation and can majorly affect their environment. They spend millions of dollars a year trying to control populations in the Australia and the States.

If elephants, locusts, cattle and goats are the bad guys, then bats, birds and lizards are the good guys….or so a feature I spotted on Wired Science says.

Bats, birds and lizards eat insects, thereby protecting plants from being eaten by those insects.

If birds make plants more likely to grow, then perhaps it’s safe to deduce that not having birds means plants won’t grow.

Which could tie up the total lack of bird visitors to my balcony with my total failure to grow any plants and veggies on said balcony….

I made a brilliant job of hanging a lardy-cake and sunflower hearts over the handrail too!

There were adults in four or five of the nests but we only spotted chicks in one. I couldn’t get over how big they are, at just 3-4 weeks old. How mum, dad and the chicks will all fit in the nest for another month I do not know.

It felt very appropriate to be talking about eggs and chicks on Easter Sunday. We got a few new membership sign-ups too, and lots of signatures on the RSPB’s Letter To The Future.

My bird recognition is definitely coming along. I’ve now got the pochard and red-crested pochard down – similar to the pochard but “a bit more disco”, as Abbi says.

We saw lots of Canada geese, barnacle geese, Whooper swans, coots, moorhens and so on on the lake.

I also saw a beautiful mandarin duck. An unfortunate name choice in my opinion – one can’t help thinking of duck a l’orange.

Final stats:

• Herons: 7-8 adults, three chicks
• Bird fights: some quality coot scrapping. Also an amusing vendetta between a Greylag Goose and an Egyptian Goose.
• Biscuits: half a pack of chocolate digestives, plus hot cross buns and Mini Eggs as a festive treat

There was exciting news on the peregrine falcon front this week too – a pair of peregrines have nested in the ‘perecam’ box and laid an egg! Footage will be shown on the RSPB website and hopefully there’ll be more to come.

My feature for Australia and New Zealand magazine on eco-volunteering in the Antipodes is in stores now….

Thanks to Biosphere Expeditions, Conservation Volunteers, Reef Check Australia and everyone else who helped out!

Click here to read it as a PDF

I made a little spread of seeds and over-ripe fruit out on her wall but the birds didn’t exactly flock to it. They need more than 20 minutes notice that the food is out, I imagine.
We were visited by a handful of winged things though – two small brown birds which I identified as wrens, and two which were definitely blackbirds.

A lovely goose flew over too, perhaps from the reservoir in Hackney, but as it didn’t land in the garden I couldn’t count it.
I’m looking forward to hearing the countrywide results in a couple of weeks.
Inspired by the BGBW, I invested in a seed-and-lard feeder which I put out on our balcony last Sunday….it hasn’t had any visitors yet to my knowledge but hopefully word will get out soon. I’m also wondering about investing in a pair of binoculars as it really was a nightmare trying to identify the few birds I did see…

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)

The massive expansion of tourism over the last 40 years has led to the rapid decline in the quality of the reef.

Coral everywhere faces the threat of bleaching because water is getting warmer because of climate change. But in highly-developed Cancun, pollution by sewage and chemicals and overfishing mean the coral in this region is dying faster than anywhere else.

The Global Coral Reef Monitoring Network says the amount of reef surface covered by live coral in the Caribbean has fallen about 80% in the past 30 years. In the Pacific, between Hawaii and Indonesia, meanwhile, reefs have been losing about 1% of their coral coverage annually over the past 25 years. eTurboNews spoke to Cancun dive instructors who said they were worried they might not have a job for much longer.

Cancun knew it needed to address the problem, but the country desperately needs its tourist dollars, and Cancun couldn’t turn divers and snorkellers away.

By building the underwater museum – which in effect becomes an artificial reef – there is something new for divers and snorkellers to explore, and the existing coral reef is given chance to recover from years of damage. I doubt it’ll ever get back to its original condition but coral will colonise the inert concrete of the sculptures, creating new coral coverage.

I must admit, the thought of an ‘underwater museum’ didn’t really float my boat at first – I dive to see wildlife, not for cultural enrichment.

But when I checked out the website of Jason de Caires Taylor, the British artist behind the project, I really warmed to the  idea.

‘Museum’ is a bit misleading – it will be more of a sculpture garden, with more than 300 life-size sculptures, such as an army of Mayan warriors, and a ‘dream catcher’ where visitors can leave a message in a bottle. I recognised the photos of his existing project – Taylor built the Underwater Gallery at Moliniere Bay in Grenada.

His description of what it’s like to experience artwork underwater sounds fantastic:

“Underwater and devoid of white walls the viewer is unrestrained in their interaction with the work. Buoyancy and weightlessness enable a detached physical experience, encouraging encounters that are perceptual and personal. As time passes and the works change, they reshape and redefine the underwater landscape in unpredictable ways.”

And the sculptures that have been submerged for some time, now covered in coral polyps and other growth, are really stunning.

Sinking a load of concrete statues is not going to solve the massive and complex threats that coral reefs around the world face but the Underwater Museum does seem like an exciting and innovative step in the right direction.

85-year-old Molly Forbes, who lives on the Menie Estate, says the development will threaten her home. She’s launched a legal challenge against the plans, claiming that environmental assessment regulations were not met, and that the impact of the complex on nearby conservation sites has not been considered. The Scotsman pits Forbes and Trump against each other as David and Goliath in terms of their respective property portfolios – though when the journalist describes Molly’s legal representation as an expert on “environ-mental matters”, I’m not sure he intended the hyphen….

It got me thinking about other negative stories I have read about the impact of golf on the environment.

I’m not against golf and golfers per-se. I once had a very enjoyable lesson at The Belfry and apparently I showed great promise. And I’ve picked up on a few ‘good news’ stories about the eco-credentials of golf recently.

The RSPB has this month co-authored a book which says golf courses can play an important role as sanctuaries for endangered birds and other wildlife. It’s had some reports of golfers who combine playing the sport with wildlife-spotting (‘birdies’ and ‘eagles’ I presume?)

And a few months back, I spoke to Carlton Carugati, general manager of the International Association of Golf Tour Operators, who explained about a new species of grass which can live on salt-water, meaning valuable drinking water supplies are not affected.

But while I can appreciate some golf courses are really doing their best (as the Golf Environmental Awards attests), I can’t help thinking that the overall impact of golfing, and particularly the construction of new courses, is pretty negative.

In 2004, WWF estimated that 10,000-15,000 cubic meters of freshwater were needed to keep golf courses in south-east Spain green for a year: “At this rate, the water used on one golf course could supply a town of 12,000 inhabitants with enough water for a whole year”. Salt-water grass sounds marvellous but until all golf courses are obliged to use it, a lot aren’t going to bother.

Columnist George Monbiot highlights another study which says an 18-hole golf course requires 22 tonnes of chemicals and pesticides per year.

The Tourism Concern website gives lots of instances of environmental and social damage caused by the creation and sustaining of golf resorts around the world.

Just last week I was interested to learn that golf balls can take up to 1,000 years to decompose, and that they release a dangerous amount of zinc as they do so. When they dredged Loch Ness in Soctland in April, they found a very different monster from the deep – hundreds of thousands of golf balls just sitting there, poisoning the water.

Golf ball littering is fairly easily resolved: any golfer who’s aim is not so good (and not just you, Dad) should invest in the biodegradable golf balls that are now on the market, made from water-soluble materials.

But to address the wider issue, and since the popularity of golf shows no signs of waning in future, I wonder if there ought to be a system of green certification so that those golf clubs which really strive to be environmentally responsible can be distinguished. A kind of ‘fair trade’ guide to golfing, perhaps. Or would that be ‘fairway trade’?

But I can’t help thinking the overall global impact, particularly of the construction of new courses, cannot be a good thing.