Well this is a first: today’s blog is going to have to come in two parts as I’m struggling to contain the things I want to say – and ask – about what I’ve concluded from the first week of really going out to look at the natural world around me.

So I’m going to start with ‘beyond’ the suburbs, but by going into the city, not out of it. This morning I was meeting a friend for coffee in central London and decided to spend some time in St James’s Park with the tourists and joggers and lovers and readers and small children and short-cut-takers. Entering from Birdcage Walk, the first thing to strike me was how many areas have been left uncut. This might not be the view you’d expect, lying on the grass in a Royal Park, but it is delightfully common.

And the trees have the quiet dignity of age and stability (I’m working on that myself):

Whilst the park is full of nest building and new life, some of the latter scoring more highly in the ‘cute’ stakes than others:

A heron demonstrated the importance of proper deportment (I need to work on that too):

And then there were the squirrels. Now, this is my first real challenge. how ‘wild’ does ‘wild’ have to be? Many of the squirrels in the central London parks will take nuts from the hands of visitors. They do not run when parents arrange children alongside them for photographs. They ‘pose’ on the backs of park benches. They are by no means as ‘wild’ as the squirrels I encounter on my suburban woodland walks, which chitter at me from the trees as I pass by. Yet is their behaviour really so different?

This one, with a large nut of some kind in its mouth, was looking for  a place to bury it. It saw me, and stopped to look.

Then bounded over the grass with much the same movement as a stoat or weasel carrying its young from burrow to burrow (thank you, Springwatch).

And solemnly buried its prize in a patch of grass and went on its way.

So that behaviour is surely more wild than not. And, as a way of introducing children to nature, absolutely captivating.

In the same way, it is not ‘natural’ for a range of water fowl to live together in the middle of a city, pelicans and all, lying happily a few inches from the feet of hundreds of camera-wielding passers-by. But it gives many of those visitors a chance to see the birds at close quarters and appreciate their colours and variety, in a way that is rarely possible elsewhere. And they are clearly not ‘tamed’ or ‘domesticated’. Are they?

So are they wild enough for my 30 Days? I think so – don’t you?