I'm in Bognor. Any chance of a quick bird?

Britain's bird watchers: strange, eccentric - but dangerous?

TONIGHT OUR nation will come together in a televisual act of worship led by the Lord High Anorak himself, David Attenborough, in the first of his series, The Life of Birds, on BBC1.

At the cost of pounds 7m of licence-payers' money Attenborough has jetted around the world so that we can learn that the world's most promiscuous bird is the fairy wren in Australia and that the kiwi is New Zealand's equivalent of a badger. As a nation waits breathlessly, the question just has to be asked: are we going crazy? Do we all live in Birdland?

It's not only the new BBC Birdie Blockbuster. A scan of a birdie newsgroup on the Net reveals desperate-sounding cases: "I will have two hours to spare late Friday afternoon in Bognor. No car. Any suggestions for a quick bird?" posts one birder.

Then there's the plaintively sad "We bird Norfolk most weekends...", conveying the image of the Corsa estate parked in the lay-by and a Barboured matron on her foldaway stool pouring tea for her wispy little husband as he checks the map for Cley or some other birdie mecca.

But enough of the smartarse stuff. Birdie folk are an easy target, right? And, hey, what harm do they do? I suspect plenty. Because this amorphous, heterogeneous mass supports what Auberon Waugh memorably described as "the most sinister organisation in Britain". He was writing of The Royal Society for the Protection of Birds, the biggest and probably most influential voluntary body in Britain.

The total membership is now around 1,150,000 and rising fast. Its main activity is in buying and managing land as nature reserves. It owns, leases or manages more than 150 nature reserves covering 102,800 hectares. It is reluctant to discuss its financial worth, though the cost of membership has risen to pounds 30 a year and there is massive income from appeals. A spokesman, however, told me that its dividend income is not as great as might be thought because (as a farmer might) it employs its resources on the day- to-day demands of its various enterprises.

But its sheer size reflects the extraordinary grip that bird worship has on the British. Take, for instance, the recent case of the Gwent Levels, on the Severn Estuary.

The Levels are - for the moment - unique, though they bear a strange resemblance to the fens of East Anglia. They were drained by the Romans to make dark, fertile soil a thousand years before the reclaiming of the fens, and they share the same misty loneliness, even though they are close to industrial South Wales. It's that closeness, though, that has brought about what, because of the manoeuvring of the RSPB, will soon be the destruction of its haunting character.

In the early Nineties, Cardiff, 20 miles down the M4, decreed one of those fashionable marina projects to reinvigorate its docklands, its centrepiece a tidal barrage to enclose a muddy inlet to form a lake. But the creek was home to many kinds of wading birds that would be made homeless. Eco-warriors protested, and a deal was made to replace the muddy acreage by flooding a different area - the Gwent Levels.

The land has already been the subject of a compulsory purchase order, dispossessing farmers such as Neville Waters who have worked the land there for generations. The cost, with development by the RSPB as a reserve, will be almost pounds 9m, at current estimates.

The reserve itself will be twice the size of the Cardiff mudflat. And another thing. Any birds evicted by the Cardiff development will, er, not actually find a home in the new Gwent Levels reserve as it will not be "suitable" for the wading birds - though ducks will love it...

That didn't matter, though, chirped the RSPB. This would put Gwent on the world conservation map, wouldn't it?

This mind-boggling audacity has aroused the ire of other conservationist forces, notably Friends of the Earth, a body that normally would line up with the RSPB. "The world's most expensive duckpond" and "environmental vandalism" snorted Gordon James, of FoE Wales.

Meantime, though, the birdie industry flourishes, fed by TV extravaganzas like The Life of Birds, which will undoubtedly break all records as a nature programme - 200 miles of film shot! 42 countries! 300 bird species! 250,000 miles of travel for Attenborough!

And there he is, on the cover of the book of the series, eye-balling what looks like a golden eagle. Let's hope it's a wild one. Last year the BBC rented a tame one called Kali for him and tried to pass it off as a bird in the wild. They now admit they filmed it in a botanical garden.

But who really cares? That's entertainment! Just put on your anoraks, birdie Britain, and watch.