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of North Africa and Southern Europe, it migrates north each year with the good weather, establishes new breeding colonies and the local offspring move north again. It reaches the UK most years, and sometimes in spectacular numbers; 2005 and 2006 were good

providing them with safe places to roost and raise their young, as well as a year-round supply of food.But I'm worried. I know that feeding birds is a good thing, it helps many survive the miserable winter to live and breed the following spring. But as I

're probably breeding in the jungle-like ivy growth that threatens to engulf our shed further up the garden.A couple of hours later, the first speckled wood, Pararge aegeria, appears, looking velvety fresh. The likelihood is that it has just emerged from

in Dulwich Woods, Beckenham Place Park, and a few other woodland places, but the ones flying past my back door are breeding in long-lost and forgotten subterranean root systems, buried logs and stumps no longer visible on the surface. But every year gardens

. This is probably not one of the soil-dwelling species, and is more likely one of the very many others that breed in dead wood, fallen branches, logs, tree stumps and sodden raised bed timbers. A gentle recycler, rather than a potato fiend.Along with it was a small

, breeding in our small pool. I always associate the imperial aeronautics of the emperor with much larger water bodies like lakes, canals and flooded gravel pits. None of those exist in East Dulwich... so who knows?

the breeding season, to lay their spawn. The rest of the time they are terrestrial animals, completely at home in the shrubbery, log pile or herbaceous border. Their very name — amphibian — is a reflection of this, deriving from the Greek amphi (both, or both

and fish and chip wrappers dumped on the ground, it's the leftovers of family picnickers. And it's not picnickers being lazy, because they have done their best to gather it all up and put their rubbish in the bins. Unfortunately, a local wildlife form has

woodpeckers, witnessed blackbirds and robins fighting over territory, and sat a little too close to a wasps' nest.It's generally a very good habitat for wildlife: there's a mass of ivy to provide food and shelter for all manner of creatures, and something

of narcissi and allied plants are grown and the larvae have caused serious damage."He then went on to enthuse about breeding times, colour forms and the insect's inexorable spread through England. Nowadays he would have to get straight on to the plant health