Last week I wrote about the invasion of our green and pleasant land by daddy longlegs.

Now, I am afraid, we are being invaded by just about every creature that has ever drawn breath in the British Isles.

Everywhere I look - in my children's school, in the office, in shop windows, even my neighbour's garage - I'm confronted with giant posters emblazoned with pictures of animals, insects and fish: birds of prey, wildfowl, butterflies, small mammals, large mammals There seems to be no end to these massive charts - sea birds, shorelife, whales and dolphins.

As anyone who has one, or two, or 39, knows, they come free with certain newspapers. I have no idea how many publications are plying us with them, but I know of at least three. My sister works for one of them and inconsiderately sent us their entire collection to add to the 1,456 we already owned.

Because of this error on her part I am being pestered from all sides - by my children and husband - to agree to putting up a variety of these posters in our house.

In spite of many protests, I have had to say a firm "No" to this request. My husband says you can't know too much about British wildlife and I totally agree, although I draw the line at donning a deerstalker and camping out in a dugout on the edge of an estuary. But while I acknowledge that there are many occasions when we turn to each other and ask "What's that bird?" or "Come and have a look at this butterfly, do you know what it is?", I don't see that having a huge chart on hand - he suggested the living room - so that we have the answer in seconds, will add to the experience.

I usually seek out one of the children's pocket-sized guides, which take up hardly any space at all on our bookshelves. We have barely got wallspace for the complete list, let alone complete set of posters.

More than one and our home would end up looking like the National History Museum. My colleague has also put her foot down and banned them from her daughter's beautifully-decorated bedroom. Her son has one - sharks - in his bedroom, while two have been permitted in the garage. This most be happening all over England, with children and parents at loggerheads, as the wildlife chart epidemic rages on.

I felt sorry for my daughter when she attempted to prop the British Butterflies chart behind her bed. But, thankfully, she removed it after agreeing that it looked creepy' in the half-light of dusk. Even in the absence of moths, it did evoke disturbing images of Hannibal Lecter.

I love British wildlife, really I do, but the overkill is slowly turning me against the likes of shrews, kestrels, hedgehogs and brown trout.

As I sit in the office writing, I am faced with a wall of garden birds, and to reach the tea room I have to pass a school of whales, plus a fair few octopus, squid and cuttlefish.

To top it all, almost every night on TV Bill Oddie is ramming British wildlife down our throats in Autumnwatch.

It's overwhelming. You can only appreciate British wildlife so much. If we get much more of it rammed down our throats there's a danger the entire adult population will stop watching and take up hunting, shooting and fishing.