So I chose covers which had distinctive artwork starting from the early punk days of '77 through to the early '90s. They were not necessarily my favourites, indeed some were not even mine (thanks to my sister, James and Mitch), as they needed to be bold and easy to see given that their use was necessarily subliminal.

Thus sadly the back catalogues of The Cure, The Cocteau Twins and the 'Mary Chain are much loved favourites but are not really distinct enough to be identifiable. Whereas things such as Heaven 17's Penthouse And Pavement (not my bag) and the Banshees (never a massive fan) worked well. And, besides, I wanted a spread of sound so more folks could 'play'. I had the sleeves copied, cut them up to the same size as the cue cards and shuffled four per show.

Here they are in order of appearance:

Programme 1:
The Clash: London Calling (the Punk Stones finest?)
The Beastie Boys: Licensed To Ill (still fighting for my right)
The Selecter: Too Much Pressure (from little sis)
The Clash: Give 'Em Enough Rope (the difficult second album defined)

Programme 2:
The Smiths: Hatful Of Hollow (so quintessentially English... perfect)
The Pixies: Doolittle (the monkey is still on its way to heaven)
Blondie: Parallel Lines (Debbie at 11.59, oh yes !)
The Cure: Boys Don't Cry (how many limits have I misjudged?)

Programme 3:
Siouxsie & The Banshees - Join Hands (umm, prefer The Scream)
The Jam - In The City (raw and sounding better with age)
Stone Roses - The Stone Roses (we adored them)
REM - Green (one of James')

Programme 4:
Carter The Unstoppable Sex Machine - 101 Damnations (witty words)
Joe Jackson - Look Sharp! (How many times have we asked: Is she really going out with him?)
The Stranglers - Rattus Norvegicus (awesome!)
The Cure - Japanese Whispers (the prettiest pop songs of that age)

Programme 5:
X-Ray Spex - Germ Free Adolescents (Poly Styrene's hair was a bit like mine at times!)
Talk Talk - My Foolish Friend (Actually a single - which foxed people)
The Psychedelic Furs - Talk Talk Talk (one of my fave bands, ever)
New Order - Power, Corruption And Lies (was great driving music)

Programme 6:
Orchestral Manoeuvres In The Dark - Architecture & Morality (does anyone know what the lyrics of Joan/Maid actually mean? Still love Sealand)
Tubeway Army - Replicas (not mine!)
The Jesus And Mary Chain - Psychocandy (the greatest debut of the '80s? The soundtrack of my life)
Adam & The Ants - Kings Of The Wild Frontier (very my sister's)

Programme 7:
Heaven 17 - Penthouse And Pavement (James')
Echo & The Bunnymen - Porcupine (back with some great songs)
The Jam - Sound Affects (umm, lost edge?)
Souixsie & The Banshees - A Kiss In The Dreamhouse (Mitch's)

I'll tweet and update this post with this week's four after the show on Friday, but they're pretty easy! If you spot them during the show, why not tell everyone what you think they are by posting a comment below.

Finally, I'd like to say a big thanks to Ellie Williams in the Autumnwatch office and David Knight in BBC Talent Rights for all their time and hard work in clearing the artwork so it could be used in a television broadcast.

Springwatch... might go literary... might go telepathy...

The latter are so named because they were once used to stupefy flies. They were ground to a paste and mixed with milk in a saucer on the window sill. The dipterans got drowsy and then drowned in the liquid.

The fungus contained an hallucinogenic agent which had previously been blended with beer and imbibed by the Viking Berserkers before these suicidal warriors charged, axe-wielding into the ranks of their enemies.

I also found no less than six death caps, probably more than I've seen in my lifetime, a lifetime not compromised by eating any of these rare and deadly toadstools.

It's a shame that for many people the reputation of this perilous artefact of nature is enough to stifle any interest in fungi. The fear of their presumed toxicity means that they are given a wide berth from a young age. An eminent mycologist once told me that a mere 1% of the UK species are poisonous, 1% are edible and that the remaining 98% are also edible (but don't taste good). Hardly statistical grounds to justify a fear of fungi.

But then there are plenty who, once properly educated, actively exploit that other 1% and descend on the autumnal forest in a ruthless horde to harvest the edibles. Spurred on by the likes of the enigmatic Carluccio and an increased interest in fine dining, they enjoy the great range of flavours that can be found for free in the woods and fields.

There is, however, a cost to this. These are the 'flowers' of the fungi, the organs which release the 'seeds' in spore form. If they are over-collected might this not have a negative impact on the future population of these species?

Well, perhaps it's a familiar story in human harvesting, in that it's all down to degree. A little local collecting to spice up the menu is likely to have no impact but when, as has happened, it becomes commercialised then surely we must have concerns. And commercial it is these days. Vans full of pickers arrive in the famed or richest areas and clear them out throughout the season.

Worse, often only one person knows which are the target species and the 'team' are instructed to 'clean-up' everything so that he/she can sort it later. The result is huge piles of inedible or fungi with little financial value found rotting on the roadside. An atrocious waste, an ugly by-product of human greed.

This greed is motivated by the rich returns to be had from successful forays. Such are the prices paid for these culinary gems. In some places guidelines or bylaws state that collecting is allowed but only for personal consumption. Recently in one such spot a woman was found with bin bags and boxes filled with 65 kilos of fungi... So that's a big meal then.

Some elementary research has been conducted. It actually seemed to show that such harvesting has no impact on fungal population densities. But I cannot believe that sustained, constant collecting will not have an effect on future abundance. Nature can only afford to produce what it needs; it never tolerates wastage, so it wouldn't produce all these toadstools if they were not actually needed.

For my part, I picked not a single thing this year. Instead I enjoyed watching big, fat, ripe, edible species get naturally nibbled by molluscs and mice and then turn to jelly after productively casting their spores on the wind.

I bet you'll be surprised by what you'll identify. Have a go and let us know what you got by posting a comment below.

Just to get you started, below is a list of what my friend identified from a small garden in the middle of Southampton. Just goes to show you don't need a country estate...

House sparrow, robin, dunnock, blackbird, blue tit, great tit, goldfinch, greenfinch, chaffinch, jay, wood pigeon, collared dove, stock dove, jackdaw, rook, magpie, sparrowhawk, black-headed gull, starling, herring gull, goldcrest, grey wagtail, feral pigeon, song thrush, mallard, mistle thrush, crossbill, chiffchaff, carrion crow, common buzzard, meadow pipit, long-tailed tit, swallow, kestrel, coal tit, lesser black-backed gull, cormorant, pied wagtail, great black-backed gull, common gull.

Total: 40 seen between 7.30am - 1pm and 3.45pm - 6.30pm

The Bible has the Lord speaking to Moses and informing him that owls are unclean, that they should not be eaten by man. The Babylonians saw them as harbingers of imminent destruction because of their liking for ruins.

The Greeks were thankfully a little more owl-centric and named Athene, their wise warrior goddess, after the owl. In turn the little owl was named after her. Not because she was little, it's the scientific name Athene noctua!

The Romans had them up as witches and their screeches foretold of death. Apparently a whole stack of owls kicked off the night before Caesar's assassination. Arabs once believe that owls represented the souls of unavenged dead and any number of poets have portrayed them as sad, solemn or cursed creatures. Shakespeare's witches added an owlet's wing to their cauldron.

That said, it was believed they also had curative qualities. Owl broth cured whooping cough and eggs ended drunkenness. Sadly not enough clutches are laid these days to put an end to binge drinking!

Bats... Again associates of witches and therefore evil. They're most famed, of course, as blood-sucking vampires in myths from Eastern Europe. What's curious about this is that these myths arose long before the discovery of the real new world vampire bats.

If bats were escaping from the poor PR of the Middle Ages (as cats have, please note) then Bram Stoker's novel Dracula from 1897 put a stake through their reputation. Bats were now sinister things that entangled themselves in the hair of women and children. In 1959 an experiment was conducted which apparently 'proved' that bats could disentangle quite well if previously tangled (presumably against their will). The '50s eh!

Quite what evolutionary, behavioural or ecological advantage could possibly be gained by getting in hair is anyone's guess.

Sadly, I still meet people genuinely frightened of bats. They usually cite bats' fast and unpredictable flight as the reason for their mistrust. Blimey, when I was eight I'd have been the happiest boy in Britain if a flock of noctules had come to my chamber. I'd have been furiously trying to entangle them in my butterfly net (not illegal then, of course).

Badgers too have been blighted with tales of misdeed: a badger crossing your intended path (that's death); a badger call followed by an owl's hoot (double death); a badger breaking into your bedroom spraying machine gun bullets (probable death, but more likely too much cheese before turning in).

Let's face it, the very simple reason all these and many more animals have inspired such a poor reputation is their straightforward nocturnality. Even now we struggle to delve into their private lives, so it's easy to see how they were so unknowable in the past. Fear arises from the unknown. What is surprising is how long such mistrust persists in the modern world. We are funny old things we humans... we can't let go of the lore.

I was moved to think about this when on Monday and Tuesday morning this week I stood on a bank of shingle and felt thousands of birds fly through me. It was a very special moment.

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The wings of thousands of red knot slashed the air like sabres and their underwings twinkled superfast as they twisted up and over my head and veered into an exploding sunrise. The scene is simple: expanses of sea, mud and sky and the players a multitude of unremarkable individuals who unite to form an unbelievable whole.

To witness this thing could be described as 'an experience of a lifetime'. But having that experience is not easy because it is choreographed by the forces of nature and astronomy and the fickle hand of the weather. You can't just buy a ticket and turn up; the cast may not, the whistle may not be blown, the curtains don't always rise.

Basically, it has the potential to happen maximally on just three mornings a year. (We explain why this is on the programme.) So let's say I plan to live an average 65 years. That's a total of 195 opportunities in a lifetime. But, let's face it, up to the teens it can't really be appreciated through the lack of comparative experiences. So maybe by 16-18 it could be a truly formative moment. So 65 minus 18 is 47. Multiply that by three and you have 141.

Then say you're at university or training in some way, that's minus another three or four years - down to 129. Then you get a job so it's weekends only - down to around 36. Then you have kids and weekends are out. And then you're into sport or music or whatever and this rules out quite a few more days. What shall we say? Down to ten. Then there's the weather, ever unpredictable especially in autumn and winter.

I think that I've been to try and see it about eight times and have succeeded on four. That's 50%. So maybe that's just five mornings in a lifetime you might have a chance to be utterly elated by birds. Five days in 23,725. Over a lifetime that's 0.25%.

I hope you are able to enjoy and relate to mine and Kate attempts to convey our excitement. It's all genuine of course and quite spontaneous. But whatever, I don't think it is any kind of substitute for the real thing. So, RSPB Snettisham, north Norfolk, two more 'good' days to go this year.

Thus cancel the Christmas shopping, dump the pantomime, find a patch of dirt on the edge of a big cold sea as it gets light and seize an incredible moment for yourselves. And don't put it off, it has only been happening for the last 30 years and given the rising sea levels it isn't guaranteed to be happening for the next 30.

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.

Creatures that hibernate literally shut down most of their machinery. They have a system that will run undamaged on ultra-slow tick-over and then return to normal service when required. Heartbeats deliberately plummet, respiration gets reorganised and all this after deliberate sequences of behaviour which will ensure survival.

So they feed up, find or make safe spaces and then retreat for the big chill out in tune with the environment. They are even enabled and programmed to wake up and rid themselves of toxins (poo and wee) to go to sleep. And, even more impressive, whilst hibernating some of these creatures are not actually sleeping at all so they wake up to go to sleep. Now tell me you knew that and didn't think it was totally amazing!

We have been to the St Tiggywinkles Wildlife Hospital near Aylesbury this week as it's pretty much hedgehog capital of the UK. This is a place where they nurture and release hundreds of below-par hogs every year. Some are injured but at this time of year many are simply underweight. For a hog to stand a good chance of making it through the winter it needs to weigh at least 600 grams, this indicates that it will be carrying enough fat to see it through.

So patients are wormed, flea-ed and given a rich supply of hearty dog food, a few vitamins and kept warm. And then when the scales tip in their favour they are released into sites where they will be safe from predators and tyres. Hedgehogs have not been doing very well in many parts of the UK for a while: too many pesticides, loss of habitat and increased traffic all contributing to a sad decline. So the work done here and at the many other similar practices is clearly important.

One little group of hogs that will definitely be spending Christmas indoors are a very late litter of three babies. These palm-filling cuties were a real hit with Kate (and just about everyone else), their big eyes, wriggly noses and twitchy whiskers giving them maximum pet-ability. And I confess I may have perhaps uttered a mild 'oooh' under my breath too.

(There's more cuties at St Tiggywinkles as this film shows.)

The reason we notice and record such apparent fluctuations is that they are perceptible in the timespan of our experiences. That is to say that I, and you, if you're over ten, remember when kestrels were our commonest raptor and were easy to see on such journeys. For some they were so familiar that they were considered a little ordinary. But now they've gone, or at least they are going, and we feel compelled to investigate why and hopefully in future conserve them.

But how would our grand parents remember the abundance of kestrels, or their grandparents? Maybe they were once rarer, perhaps in the peak of the 1950s pesticide crisis they decreased only to recover more rapidly than other species such as the buzzard and the sparrowhawk.

Sparrowhawks are another interesting case. When I was studying kestrels as a teenager in the 1970s they were uncommon. Finding a nest was a big deal. But now I read letters from people who claim that they are reaching plague proportions, that they are responsible for the diminishing number of songbirds.

The thing is that these people, and you and me, probably became aware of birds and thus began to measure their relative abundance when the population was on its knees. Now it's just getting back to normal and thus to some they seems over-abundant.

Not that it could be. The sparrowhawk population is self-regulating and largely determined by that of its prey. No predator eats itself into extinction. So blaming it for a songbird genocide is a fundamentally flawed concept. We should in fact be celebrating the sparrowhawk's recovery.

This phenomenon is called 'shifting baseline syndrome' and it's proving to be a real hindrance to effective conservation in some instances. Natural systems rarely function in parallel with the human lifespan and of course if we are messing those systems around they may not re-stabilise in our lifetimes. Thus maybe some of the positives and negatives will in time cancel each other out.

Kestrels mainly feed on small mammals and sparrowhawks on small birds. So it's unlikely that the increase in the latter is responsible for the decrease of the former. But what about buzzards? They do eat small mammals. Could their also significant recovery be having a negative impact on the kestrel? And now that those arch exterminators goshawks are again widespread, what effect might they be having on other raptor numbers?

The UK countryside is a dynamic and interesting place and change is not something we should necessarily fear before we fully research and understand it.

A few swallows were heading out from the bill and a couple of great skuas were spotted wending past far out to sea. We went inland to Weymouth, where we enjoyed a real treat, an intimate insight into the roosting habits of the pied wagtail.

This evolved into a quintessential Autumnwatch piece - technology and imagination revealing something totally unexpected about a very familiar species, a bird we all think we know but which very few have had the chance to examine in this revealing way. I was genuinely very, very excited and it was nice to bump into local wagtail watcher Steve Hales in the car park and to be able to invite him in to enjoy our views first hand.

Next morning... it was raining, no good for mist-netting. But Kate persevered and caught a couple of interesting birds and a bit later I went through the moth trap at the Bird Observatory with the brilliant Martin Cade. I've had the privilege of working with Martin on a few previous occasions and I always learn new things. He is not only one of my teenage heroes (his notes in the British Birds Journal were legendary) but one of the nation's most modest yet greatest naturalists. And he's a really nice bloke to boot. As usual the Obs was busy with other blokes birding about and mulling over stuff. Teas were served, slurped and savoured. Then we went to Radipole Lake Reserve .

I like 'Radipoli' as I like to call it. It glamorises the Weymouth resort by adding a little Italian pizzazz to it. I've seen some really good birds there over the years. It and its sister Lodmoor have sadly shrunk over the years due to repeated developments and I have long felt that it hasn't really maximised its potential as a fabulous urban reserve in terms of visitor facilities.

It's one thing appealing to bitterns and marsh harriers, which bred this year, but putting people in contact with birds is perhaps more important in sites such as this. Thus I was delighted to learn from the hospitable and extremely helpful staff and volunteers that there are some really exciting plans for the reserve's future, starting with a re-fit of the centre in February of next year. Fingers crossed that the mix of conservation and engagement comes to fruition soon.

A massive thanks to all, especially on the second day when their help meant that we were able to do a short piece about... bearded tits. Super-dooper birds .

Roll on Friday...

If I'm honest with you, we did a really, really rough rehearsal last night and it ran over by... 20 minutes. We knew it would, we just wanted to workout just how much too much was. What's clear is that we have got a PACKED programme, with some good stories and some top species and great behaviour.

Gordon's been out catching up with all sorts of stuff and about Martin has some surprises in store for the Unsprung half hour. He won't let Kate and me in on them. I dread to think. I fear pain and embarrassment.

The highlight of the run through was Simon's 'ad-libing' to his lack of finished films. Without the edited material he filled the allotted time by enacting the story of rutting red deer by improvising, impersonating and imagining each scenario. It was brilliantly done, positively Shakespearean and highly amusing. It's a bit of a pity he won't be doing it tonight. The real deer have a lot to live up to!

Anyway, as I sit here waiting to have the Presenter Meeting (the hour- or two- or three- long 'creative discussion' that will finally determine the probable/maybe/perhaps content of the programme) the mood is good. We've been lucky with the weather, got some nice stuff to show you and everything is looking and sounding technically right. All we have to do is fuse it all into a thing of beauty and our job will be done.

Actually, I'm going to sign off as I need to speak to a man about some birds and I need to fiddle with some tricks I'm secreting up my own sleeve. And I need to retrieve a female vapourer moth and her cocoon which I put in a plastic container this week as I'm going to be angling for an opportunity to tell you about this species' amazing lifecycle. The geek cant wait to get going!

I'll be blogging regularly throughout the eight weeks of Autumnwatch so please be sure to come back for more.

Autumn seeps in gently, unfolds in the dingles and dales and unfurls in the copses and spinneys. It builds, envelopes and plateaus before drifting darkly into winter leaving just the rustle of windy leaves behind it.

It has a greater variety of flavours and moods and a massive spectrum of sounds. Rooks caw, deer grunt, trees creak, leaves whisper and lots of species spend their last breaths in all but silence. It can be exhilarating or very sad but one thing is assured... it is always dynamic. That's why watching it will be such fun.

Autumnwatch has changed to cope with this fickle season. An hour a week for eight weeks plus an extra half hour of Autumnwatch Unsprung will give us the time and scope to try to capture all of autumn's splendour and spectacle and hopefully give everyone the chance to get involved so that we can see what's happening all over the UK in the run up to December, by which time winter should have arrived.

It's my first time on the programme of course and I'm pleased to be on board. The place is humming with last-minute ideas and scheduling and it looks good to come together for a cracking look at some really great wildlife.

I'm taking my usual laid-back approach. I can't ever muster a panic, so I'm not getting too worried about the final detail. I'm very confident that it will all 'come together' when it's crunch time at nine on Friday.

There's lots to look forward to: whirling waders, whiffling geese, the glistening black noses of sleepy hedgehogs, bats, migrating birds, hopefully some sunshine, a little mist, maybe a shower between shoots and a flurry of snow at the end. In reality we've been lucky with September and we know it won't last: cold and wet is part and parcel of the agenda.

So, it's a case of see ya summer (which seemed to rush away whilst I spent most of the spare parts of it painting the outside of the house, the Itch and the Scratch waiting dutifully till the brush ran dry) and hello to autumn. Please turn on and get involved, send us your questions, pictures or home movies. And I've got to go... a rehearsal beckons.

I'll be blogging regularly throughout the eight weeks of Autumnwatch so please be sure to come back for more.