I HAVE just returned from Canada as part of my work for the Mersey Basin Campaign. This organisation is a world leader in dealing with water problems.

Canada has more than 20 per cent of the world's fresh water but the problem is that much of this is in the wrong place. There are areas which have not seen rain for two years and even the ground water has been contaminated by the faeces of cattle. This is a problem but it is also causing problems in Britain. Canada is developing mini treatment works for farms and eventually Britain may want to do something similar.

I spent some time studying the bison which are also called buffalo. I saw these wonderfully tough animals in museums and also wild on the prairie. To the native people the buffalo were sacred and provided all their needs from food to clothing.

The native people conserved their buffalo but when the white settlers came they set about slaughtering the animals by the thousand. I saw photographs of walls made just out of buffalo bones.

Autumn (or fall) is a wonderful time in Canada although the temperature at night was down to minus15C. I spent time watching the elk which is the North American equivalent of our red deer.

Their breeding display includes the males fighting with locked antlers and I was shown how to watch elk from a safe distance by standing in the right place, with plenty of cover and with the wind blowing from the animal away from me.

Autumn is also the time to watch birds flying south from their breeding grounds. There were tumbling waterfalls, spectacular rivers and cool but tranquil lakes. Here I watched Canada geese, which are now common in Britain, but are found here literally in thousands. Even then this was not the dominant goose species. This honour goes to the snow goose.

These were present in such vast numbers that I could see why these white birds earned their name. There were so many of them on one reservoir that they did indeed look like drifts of snow.

Experts who were with me pointed out that during the day we had seen more than a million migrating snow geese. Their droppings in the water are beginning to cause a pollution problem and this problem will soon have to be tackled by ecologists.

Similar problems (although associated with different species) will soon have to be tackled throughout the world, especially in China, Russia, Africa, but also in parts of Britain.

Coming back to the snow goose, I was shown that the species not only has a white phase but a minority are bluish, grey in colour. Mixed in were gulls, grebes and ducks, including the goosander and goldeneye, which also occur in Britain.

The mallard is as common in Canada as in Britain, while there seemed to be ospreys, peregrines and ravens in the upland areas. The autumn colours of the trees were wonderful which made me glad to get back to Britain because our trees are not yet at their spectacular best. In the coming couple of weeks I will be out and about in search of the wildlife of the East Lancashire woodlands.