This is beyond ironic, in fact, it spins irony on it's head and leaves it facing the opposite direction it started from. Why is it that I encounter more wildlife in Central London than I ever did growing up in the wilderness of the South Yorkshire countryside? Most days are like being on Safari... well, let's get some reason in here, some lightness of touch perhaps; I'm not talking about being stalked across the sweating savanna of Hyde Park by say, a Cheetah, or a Panther silently uncoiling itself as it picks me out wandering through the more remote, leafier parts of Holland Park.

It's the UK's own milder wildlife, red in tooth and claw nonetheless (try telling a chicken that a fox is really misunderstood and conflicted, and just needs some impulse control), that I seem to be bumping into day after day. Foxes principally: snuffling through the bins; or jauntily trotting on the pavement as if they're en route to some liaison; or loudly mating...please, hurry up or at least stop faking it...the noise, the screeching...and always at night. Humans sleep at night, it's what we do. Remember that, some consideration please.

I never saw a single fox all the time I was growing up in mining country. Not one, living or otherwise. These days, we're crossing the road together.

No different when it comes to Bird life, either. All the birds, that by rights form part of the country backdrop, therefore those I should have seen as a youngster, and which if I actually ever did, were usually no more than pinheads flapping hazily on some distant washed out horizon, are popping like mushrooms after the rain in London.

Yesterday, it was a very elegant Grey Heron, poised, dapper, like a member of some minor Royal Household almost, standing proprietorially on the fringe of the Japanese garden pond in Holland Park. No more than ten feet away from me and scores of others, and entirely oblivious of us. Aloof, maybe even disdainful: "two arms, two legs, funny shaped heads, and that plumage, just look at that...no way is that intelligent design"

Never a more apt term than urban jungle: the skies of Chiswick, where I sometimes stay, are dominated by squadrons of shrieking, hollering lurid green Parakeets. Surely there must be the ornithological equivalent of an ASBO available.

I spent a few days in Paris recently. I don't know how wild the City of Lights is when it comes to what I've just been writing about in London, but I got some clues nature is n't daunted. Mid-afternoon, I saw an imperious looking Crow had fixed itself on to the top of a set of traffic lights on the corner of the Rue St Honore and Rue de Roule, and was cawing away in the manner of a bell being tolled for a funeral. A crack of thunder, a muttering, wild-haired old man, pacing the streets and it could have been straight out of Edgar Allen Poe.

It's what the urban jungle could end up looking like, if we are unable, or indeed unwilling, to square up to the consequences of climate change. The thought of something snake like, slithering along the U-bend, getting closer and closer to breaking the surface of the water, before popping open the toilet lid like the hatch on submarine. Imagine that.