I went back to 'Hunky Dory' and on to 'Diamond Dogs' and 'Rebel, Rebel' remains a top ten all time favourite track. I got 'Young Americans' too but bought nothing beyond 'Low'. I remember being sat in that same bedroom, now with a record player, and playing 'Sound and Vision', getting up, and putting on 'Janie Jones' by the Clash. My world had changed and although I liked some of Bowie's stuff up till 1980, I have never got beyond that and remember loathing the rock gods 'Dancin' in the Street' in 1985. Can't argue with 'Suffragette City', 'The Jean Genie' and 'Drive In Saturday' though, and if you don't know the words to 'Space Oddity' then you've been committing 'Rock 'n' Roll Suicide'.

Related links
Springwatch versus Manic Street Preachers
Springwatch 2010 - The Cure: From The Smiths to Robert
Damned Autumnwatch 2011
David Bowie (Official site)

We knew we wanted to look into this issue on Springwatch this year. We didn't expect to see a cat take a nest of wood warblers on our live webcams.

But that's the reality. Right there, in front of our eyes.

Our gardens have become vital for wildlife, and we need to find ways to make keeping cats and feeding birds compatible. Conservative and current estimates put the number of songbirds killed by cats in the UK each year to be 55 million.

There are two questions - what's the real effect of cats on our birds and what can we do about it?

The science needs to be brought up to date. Tonight on Springwatch, we feature the launch of research at Reading University who are taking a new approach to that first question. Cat-cams hope to track exactly what our cats are up to at night. (Previous research is usually based on the number of animals which cats bring back home, and a presumption of what percentage of their kills this number represents.)

Some say that if cats didn't kill all those songbirds, something else would. Well let's reduce cat kills and see if that happens. Personally, I'd rather a sparrowhawk got a meal than an already well-fed cat.

So what can we do it?

• Keeping cats indoors at night cuts predation in half.
• Fitting a new style beeper collar also cuts bird predation by 45-50%.
• Get our cats neutered. A neutered cat is less likely to roam.

3 small steps, with huge consequences for our garden birds.

We used to let our dogs walk themselves around our streets and parks, now we use leads and pooper-scoopers. So isn't it time that we changed the way we keep our cats too?

For me one of the best bits of my job is meeting people who are more knowledgeable about a subject than me and who are keen to tell me all about it. Very often of course such knowledge comes from a lifetime of enthusiastic interest or study and thus my tutors are 'older' folk.

What a real treat it was to visit Jake this week. He is nine... nine and already brimming with real expertise in the field of bones and skulls and as a happy consequence I learned a lot. His bedroom is the perfect mix of skulls and Star Wars... we talked for hours!

It seems he enjoyed it too and you can read about our day on his blog: 'Today I was filmed for Autumnwatch'.

Editor's note: You can watch the film of when Chris met Jake on Autumnwatch, 8.30pm Friday 25 November on BBC Two.

Every Damned show I've ever seen (and there have been many) has been hugely enjoyable, often a cabaret of lunacy set to one of the most exciting set of songs ever played. I've been lucky enough to meet the band several times over the years and jolly nice blokes they are too, not something that be said of all my punk rock idols!

Me in 1983, in my post-punk days.

So when people started asking which song titles I might try to weave into this year's shows I thought... The Damned!

I got off to an early start by welcoming Micheala as a 'New Rose', unfairly but predictably described the lesser horseshoe bats as 'Grimly Fiendish', described the modelling clay facsimile of their noses as 'Neat, Neat, Neat' and pertinently saw wild boar 'Smash it Up'.

In programme two I said Spurn Point was home to one the best birds in 'The History of the World', the Atlantic salmon allowed a very easy 'Fish' and, of course, I've always been a member of the sparrowhawk 'Fan Club'.

In week three I wondered whether we'd 'See Her Tonight' (a badger that is), foraging is never 'Hit or Miss' a late suckling red deer calf was a 'Problem Child' and rutting fallow deer were in a state of 'Psychomania'. Pretty fair given their passionate energies at this time.

In our fourth show I asked Martin if he was more of a 'Disco Man' than a fan of 5th Dimension and requested that people should not employ 'Machine Gun Etiquette' when going out to observe deer.

Thirteen so far, more to come...

Update 25 November

Programme five had barnacle geese who made 'Noise, Noise, Noise'. We had to 'Creep' up on them. Then sparrowhawks were 'Born to Kill', our clever cameramen pulled some magic out of the hat that wasn't a 'White Rabbit', Martin was 'So Messed Up' over his opinion of waterfowl, we were waiting for a predators 'Shadow to Fall' and, most dubiously, Bewick's swans were not in 'Wait for the Blackout' but a whiteout during the weather forecast analysis.

My best link in programme six was not only tenuous but a 'Stretcher Case'. 'Baby' swans followed to complete the title and confuse Michaela. We could all genuinely 'Feel the Pain' of the gannet ensnared in fishing net and 'Don't Cry Wolf' and 'Twisted Nerve' flowed into the fox aggression chat. 'I Just Can't Be Happy Today' described my dismay at the weather, a waxwing was the object of 'My Desire' and turnstones were a bit of a 'Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde' bird .

'1 of the 2' kicked off in seven and 'Don't Trouble Trouble' and 'Tightrope Walk' again slipped in nicely whist discussing the fox fight. 'Melody Lee' was sadly only a fictitious Twitter name for a question for Roy Dennis and once again the uninspiring weather in terms of migration was there to 'Torture Me'.

Thirty two titles in seven, so one more to go with some really tricky titles to weave in... 'Anti Pope', 'Plan Nine', 'Channel Seven' and 'Jet Boy, Jet Girl'. Oooh, there's a challenge!

These legends are now on a 35th Anniversary tour with Stuart West, Monty Oxymoron and Pinch with UK dates between the 9th and 20th of November. I wouldn't miss it if I were you!

Editor's note: See how skilfully Chris wove Manic Street Preacher song titles into this year's Springwatch. So well, in fact, that it was picked up by the NME, the Mail and the Telegraph among others.

Some of their titles were always going to be a challenge to gently segue into Springwatch programmes, that challenge as before to do it without it either being obvious or incongruous or interrupting the flow of the show. 'Close To Me', 'Round And Round And Round', 'A Short Term Effect', 'Never Enough' and the like were easy. But I was lucky with 'Plastic Passion' with the bustard decoys and it was a pity that nothing cropped up which permitted 'The Lovecats', 'Love Song' or 'A Japanese Dream'.

Kate did a couple for me one night - 'Why Can't I Be You' and 'To Wish Impossible Things' - but also helped with the two most satisfying scores. 'Killing An Arab' was the one for which she fed me the 'killing' when we were talking about flies and Martin lined up a 'three' to seed the 'imaginary' from me and 'boys' from Kate when we were discussing the end of the Twitch-Off. My '10.15 Saturday Night' was a bit misplaced and 'Fire in Cairo' presumably surreal, as was 'Bananafishbones' and splitting 'Friday' and 'I'm in Love' over a sentence hopefully didn't jar too much.

Obviously many Cure titles are 'one-worders' and therefore not fair game. These would be too easy or too ambiguous. Indeed, I'm sure many quite accidentally found their way into our random ramblings. But none were intended as were the following 34 deliberate ones...

Programme 1:
A Forest
The Baby Screams
Boys Dont Cry
Bird Mad Girl

Programme 2:
Never Enough
The Caterpillar
The Upstairs Room

Programme 3:
Hot, Hot, Hot
Plastic Passion

Programme 4:
Disintegration
10-15 Saturday Night

Programme 5:
Round And Round and Round
Why Cant I Be You (Kate)
To Wish Impossible Things (Kate)

Programme 6:
More Than This
Just Like Heaven

Programme 7:
Seventeen Seconds
The Hanging Garden

Programme 8:
Short Term Effect
Close to Me

Programme 9:
Friday I'm In Love
Lets Go to Bed
How Beautiful You Are
Jumping Someone Else's Train

Programme 10:
The Walk
In Between Days

Programme 11:
Killing An Arab
Bananafishbones

Programme 12:
A Night Like This
Charlotte Sometimes
Fire In Cairo
You're So Happy
Three Imaginary Boys
Lullaby

I'm sure most viewers realise that in many ways death makes the wild world go round, that predators have to predate to survive themselves. Well, most but sadly not all... A few people still seem to react with prejudice to the natural and entirely explicable actions of species such as magpies and sparrowhawks, which they suspect are responsible for the significant declines in some songbird populations.

But repeated and thorough research demonstrates this is a flawed thesis: predator populations are necessarily self-regulating and none can eat its prey into such paucity that it threatens its own extinction - thus the black and blues and the dashing missiles are just scapegoats. Songbird decline undoubtedly has its roots in habitat decline, and for the migrant songbirds there are also problems in their wintering ranges.

But some still feel that what they do to survive is 'not very nice', that 'it's cruel' or that they are 'nasty birds'. They are not, they are as near perfect as every other living thing (bar us) and what they do is part of nature's bigger picture - a bigger picture that is perhaps the most beautiful thing we can learn to see.

When we watch all the species we do, in the incomplete way that we do, it is very difficult to join all our experiences and brief insights into a joined up map of inter-relations. We can go to a basic ecology text and look at pond food webs, read about tropic levels, grass, antelope, lion... but the fact is that everything we see, in our gardens, down the nature reserve, is connected and, given a chance, it is functional.

That functionality is a form of perfection and perfection is beauty. We mess it up and interrupt and thwart its progress, but nature is tenacious. And on many levels it overcomes our clumsiness and still glows in the purity of its dynamic perfection.

That perfection is fuelled by the balance of predator and prey, the necessary cycling of nutrients, carbon and water, through the complexities of the bits of the world we glimpse around us. That's why the tiny, pretty, baby bird being torn up and eaten by another is actually a thing of beauty. Think about it. Reality is true.

So assuming it's proved this is a fox attack, this is - thankfully - an extremely rare incident. What we need to do now is focus on how we react to this appropriately and not in a knee-jerk kind of a way. Careful consideration and a proportionate response, as they say in the business world. Millions of us live comfortably alongside urban foxes in cities - and of course they have in the past been stars of Springwatch and many other TV programmes. There are more foxes in our cities than there were - an estimated 33,000 urban foxes - roughly 16% of our UK fox population.

At my place in the New Forest, I've put up a small electric fence to protect my chickens and the chickens and foxes that visit the garden live very well in the same patch. The fence cost me £80. I put out food for local foxes every night and they often come in to feed just 15m away from my chickens. This has worked very well for all concerned for the past year.

Some relevant links:
How common are fox attacks on humans?
RSPCA
The Mammal Society

Frank is the Bat-man. I've met a few and in all fairness his commitment is not unique, nor perhaps is his contribution to 'Bat Awareness', but for me he encapsulates a distillation of all of their skills... plus he is some sort of 'techno-genius' on top. And as a result his photos are brilliant. And he has a shed. A real Great British Shed, in which he melds his field observations and questions with his inventiveness and determination to find a means of answering them.

He imagined, devised, built and used a 'twiddler' to lure specific bats into his custom-built, high-speed flash guns made using some sort of military silicon hardware. And because it's a British shed, it's called a 'Twiddler', not a 'Sono-rotatory-ultrasonic-chiropto-lure'. That would be California, not Surrey. His skill base is unbelievable and his enthusiasm quiet but electric. He is Hero Number One.

Hero Number Two is Dave Culley. On his side is that he totally out-loves me when it comes to my favourite bird, the sparrowhawk. But I soon realised that he has gone way beyond this. Dave doesn't sleep for about 11 months of the year. Well, he snatches a few winks but not if his precious hawks are active. He has bugged his nesting pair with a multitude of self financed cameras and webbed them to the world.

He has also most importantly been very, very critically watching and analysing their most intimate behaviour. He stayed awake for 60 hours to record an egg hatching. He has blown apart the idea that sparrowhawks 'start nesting' in March... because hangover-free Dave has seen his male starting to build a nest on New Year's Day. That's pretty hardcore. And also Dave loves knowing, not smugly; he was burning to tell me everything all day when we were filming, and he just wants to find out more. He has plans, his energy is inexhaustible, Dave is Mr Accipiter Nisus. Wow!

I met Raury McKenzie-Dodds in 1991. Or 1993, he will remember. It was a coldish, damp, very un-dragonfly afternoon when we were tinkering around with some now antiquated slo-mo camera. He had inaugurated the National Dragonfly Museum at Ashton Water and instantaneously I fell in love with his amazing passion for the Orthoptera.

He had a big-wig job in the city. A dragonfly landed on his shirt and he saw the light. Magic eh! It by his own admission 'changed his life' and that life has since had an unswerving desire to communicate his epiphany to the world. When Ashton faltered, his motivation didn't and the Dragonfly Project found safe and welcome refuge at the superb National Trust's Wicken Fen Reserve. Here they now have a new centre which is a focus point for the enthusiasm of all things dragons and damsels. Go, visit, enjoy.

But, to be honest, this is all desperately unfair. Frank and particularly Raury enjoy the support of an equally heroic set of fellow enthusiasts. It's just that I don't know them as well, and of course there is a small but priceless guild of other uber-geeks whose company I have yet to revel in. Days to dream about...

Editor's note: Celebrate the geek with Chris and watch his films from this year's Springwatch: Dragonfly geek; Bat geek; and Sparrowhawk geek.

I'm sure that many people will consider what they are about to read as a little quirky if not completely mad. But here goes. Ever since I first started to roam and ramble I've been looking at poo. Not a casual glance or a furtive squint, but a hands-and-knees close-up, full critical examination in terms of colour, size, shape, texture, content and, of course, smell.

Some species are nocturnal or incredibly shy or both and thus their very presence is difficult to detect. The otter is an obvious example. Yet otter poo (or spraint) is pretty easy to find if there are otters about and very easy to identify, certainly through smell if the sample is sufficiently fresh. Indeed, on a chilly winter's morning the bitter twang rising from a steaming spraint is a delicious shot in the nasal passages, always a treat to savour.

So otter is easy as are fox, badger, weasel and stoat. All of these have diagnostic aromas despite being variable in terms of their form due to the recently consumed diet. Position is also important, for instance badgers deposit their faeces in pits called 'latrines' which act as territorial boundary markers. Deer are easy too, with a little practice. As are bats, although I'm not any sort of expert when it comes to chiropteran stuff myself.

Bird poo is often a little more tricky than mammal but through direct observation and practice you can get quite close to species specific identification. Narrowing down into groups is a start. Again, as an example, raptor poo or 'mutes' typically have a very thick and plastery white component which when dry is powdery.

Tawny owl mutes often seem to have a yellowy wash, as will kestrels', occasionally perhaps an artefact of their broadly similar diets. More investigation is needed here! Poo produced by the grouse family is really easy to identify as it is produced in neat cylindrical pellets. I'm lucky to have in my collection red and black grouse, ptarmigan and the real prize, capercaillie excrement. Obviously location helps in guaranteeing correct analysis but so does relative diameter, an artefact of the bird's size.

Perhaps my favourite bird poo (and I'm sure many other people's too) is produced by the green woodpecker. Again cylindrical, it can be found on short grassy areas where the birds have been foraging. It is about 6-8mm in diameter and somewhere between 25-35mm in length. Its outer skin is white and the interior, visible at either end, is tan brown and roughly textured, so it can look a bit like a crumpled length of a cigarette.

The real joy of woodpecker poo, however, is picking up a dry length and squashing it in the palm of your hand as this reveals the contents as the bodies of countless ants which the bird had eaten, lots of tiny legs and heads and abdomens. Superb.

Anyway, whilst shivering between trap-lines I heard a terrible row, splashing, flapping, going on over by the bank. Pretty much too cold to care, I didn't investigate until it went on so long that I had no choice. So I crunched the frost across the water meadow and cautiously peered over the bank to see the slippery form of an otter writhing upstream. It surfaced once, instinctively saw me, dived and disappeared. I saw it for the sum total of perhaps five seconds and yet to this day remains as one of the best Christmas presents that I have ever had. Ever.

The second view - glimpse better describes it - occurred when I rented a house overlooking the same river 20 years later and a strange noise woke me through an open window. I rose to watch a female and cubs scampering across the street-lit mud. It was almost as good, only tempered by the other diurnal encounters I had enjoyed in the interim. Since then I have had other audiences outside my 'home county' most notably and regularly at the Big Waters nature Reserve just north of Newcastle Airport where the irrepressibly enthusiastic Kevin O'Hara has shared my daylit joy of a succession of fabulous otter moments.

Anecdotally, it seems that as our populations of these secretive and mercurial mustelids gradually increases then they have become ever so slightly more amenable to showing themselves in decent light. Forced encounters may breed a little more trust from them but then there are so many more people out on freezing December mornings on the look-out too and, here at Pensthorpe, our comprehensive camera coverage means that in all honesty we are seeing them 'unseen' by human eyes.

With the greatest respect to our marvellous Story Developers, their noisy, smelly human eyes are safely locked up a half a mile away in our 'Mission Control' and the shy otters are blissfully unaware of the treats that they are providing us all with.

I can't help but feel that it will be a few years yet before this understandably cautious sect of creatures becomes brash enough to start tap dancing beneath our bird tables. And all the better for it... there is no allure stronger than that of the oh-so almost attainable, those things that tease us from the brink of our reality. The dream-creatures that might once grace our lives and leave us thinking that there might actually be a Santa Claus after all.