Sylvia Centron is the only woman with whom I have had a serious relationship in Latin. We met in Paraguay earlier this year; she is an ornithologist with Guyra Paraguay, a remarkable and effective organisation. I was there reporting for this newspaper on a ground-breaking conservation initiative, but I also managed a spot of birding.

Sylvia is good all right, but she doesn't know the English common names, while I don't know the Spanish names. So we used scientific names, which I can just about manage. I remember a glorious gathering of birds over a river: “Vanellus?” I asked. “Si. No! Caprimulgus!” What?

Not a plover but a nightjar? At midday? But she was, of course, right: there was a couple of dozen nighthawks - añapero boreal, if you are a Spanish-speaker, and from the family Caprimulgidae to all bird-people across the world.

I have to admit that my knowledge of neotropical binomials is not exhaustive, but we were able to busk it, with copious reference to my copy of Aves de Paraguay. I saw Sylvia this week; she is currently on attachment to that remarkable Suffolk-based international conservation organisation, the World Land Trust, and she showed me her masterpiece.

Just published, in Spanish and a little Latin, it is grittily entitled Important Bird Areas of Paraguay. Sylvia is not the sole author, but she is a leading voice in this important publication. Conservation can't begin until we know what to conserve, after all, and here are 57 places that seriously matter. But this publication does a great deal more than make lists: it also investigates the social and economic importance of these areas to Paraguay and to the world.

The book is a triumph, and it is the vital first step for the serious conservation work that lies ahead. This sort of thing begins with hard-working, highly skilled people on the ground doing the work they care about deeply. I remember a boat ride along the Paraguay River, and the sight of the world's most outrageous bird, the toco toucan: a revelation of all the wonders and absurdities the world has to offer. I even know that one in Spanish: tucán grande; just as well; the scientific name is Ramphastos toco.

High society

Chamois have been so thoroughly mythologised and utilised that the real animal has got lost. But somewhere out there, between the car-cleaning cloth and the cute names for chalet holidays, there are tough, goaty and, in some places, critically endangered beasts still leaping about the mountains.

I bumped into a small herd the other week in the Tatra mountains in Slovakia, a gorgeous and dramatic landscape on the slopes of which only a chamois can be truly confident. It was something of a long-range bump: they were on an adjacent peak, somewhere between the tree-line and the snow-line.

But there they were, horned, a gathering, presumably, of females and young, for the males tend to be solitary. It is astonishing to think that these creatures of legend actually exist, and that they do so in Europe. They are not as delicate as the image leads you to think: more sheep and goat than fey little antelope. They are doing well in the Alps and elsewhere. But the subspecies in Slovakia and Poland is down to 200 individuals, and is critically endangered.

Wild Europe. It is a difficult subject to grasp: we live in an overcivilised continent. You need to travel to the heights to get a taste of the way our ancestors lived, lonely places where you can still find bears and wolves. To encounter this small heard of chamois was a journey that not only went up to the heights: it also cut deeply into time.

Nutcracker treat

Many of the bird books you can buy have funky birds you will scarcely ever see in this country: azure-winged magpie, bluethroat, Bonelli's eagle, that sort of thing. These books are mightily confusing to a beginner.

You don't see the weird birds, but you keep stumbling across their pictures as you look up other, less recondite species. As a result, they become part of your mental birding landscape. The nutcracker is just such a bird: a speckled crow, a bit like a giant starling with a mighty butcher's cleaver of a beak.

These do occasionally turn up in Britain, sometimes in numbers when they meet seriously hard times in their homelands. It was a pleasure, then, to meet a nutcracker in Slovakia: a bit like shaking hands with an author whose books you always liked.

So there was the nutcracker at a kind of woodland book-signing, in the sense that he was not hiding away but doing his best to make himself both visible and agreeable. Nutcrackers hunt and hoard seeds, burying them in the ground, and so they work as freelance tree-planters on behalf of the forests they live in: not only exploiting their environment but nurturing it: a hopping, pecking sermon for the human race.

Extreme twitch

It's as much a part of English life as the Lord's Test match and Wimbledon, but without a fixed date. The twitchers have irrupted again: this time on Land's End in search of a lost American warbler. Wish them joy: but don't for a second think that theirs is the only or even the best way to enjoy the wild world. Me, I'm staying in Suffolk.

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