A few of words of caution Alan from another 60+ who was about to go DSLR and didn't
(1) I also belong to an outfit called Wild About Britain (use link on my signature.) I noticed a trickle of people using FZ30s, but few stuck to them and I think there is both comment and a lot of bird and nature pics posted there too. You can also do camera based search on pbase. Obviously a lot of people are younger and richer.
(2) as an FZ7 owner, the cheap and cheerful Panasonic 12x, I suspect you may find FZ50 performs better with good light than in poor, but that may not be a worry if you have to get public transport home! I also had a chance to sell my FZ7 and had a look at Canon S3 IS again as I had wondered whether to spend the extra on it when I bought. Came to the conclusion people were not putting out any better images, the controls are less user friendly, but it might just have a good enough lens to stand a 1.4 or 1.7 converter, but then so does the FZ50 and the controls on that are even more accessible than on my FZ7, ie more manual, less joystick. Agree that the Leica is almost identical.
(3) the image stabilisation is a great selling point on panas, but I don't think it is worth bothering with unless pushing luck at 1/20sec or longer, better to jam one edge against something and the snib on the back is useful for that - and what may not at first be obvious is that every in-camera tweak you use makes it more difficult to do corrections with PS later; the panas are also designed for folks that by-pass the computer and go straight from camera to printer "daft I call it"