UK Nature and Environment

When British conservationists flew to Slovenia this summer hoping to catch enough singing cicadas to reintroduce the species to the New Forest, the grasshopper-sized insects proved impossible to locate, flying elusively at great height between trees.

Now a 12-year-old girl has offered to save the Species Recovery Trust’s reintroduction project. Kristina Kenda, the daughter of the Airbnb hosts who accommodated the trust’s director, Dom Price, and conservation officer Holly Stanworth in the summer summer, will put out special nets to hopefully catch enough cicadas to re-establish a British population.

“I’m very pleased to be able to help the project,” Kristina said. “I like nature and wildlife and it was fun helping Dom and Holly look for cicadas when they were here. Cicadas are a part of the summer in Slovenia so it would be nice to help make them a part of the summer in England as well.”

A new trail along the east coast of England should be created, a Tory thinktank has said, because farmland is preventing those who live there from having access to nature.

A report from Onward has found that in most rural areas, people enjoy extensive rights-of-way networks. But across the east of England, there are many areas where people have barely anywhere they are allowed to walk in the countryside. This, the report says, is because of large areas of high-grade farmland in that area, but also because Lincolnshire has the largest backlog for recognition of historical but unrecorded rights of way, with more than 450 outstanding applications.

According to green space metrics created by the Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs and the nature charity Wildlife and Countryside Link, half of local authorities in the worst 10% for access to nature are in eastern England. Almost nine-tenths of local authorities in the east have below-average access to green space.

A pioneering south of Scotland conservation project is setting its sights on re-introducing golden eagles into England and Wales.

For the past six years young birds have been taken from the Highlands and released into rural parts of the Scottish Borders and Dumfries and Galloway.

The population of the birds in the area has soared from a threatened handful in 2018 to currently standing at about 50.

Dr Cat Barlow, project manager with the South of Scotland Golden Eagle Project (SSGEP), said: "We hope our next phase will be to give the eagles a hand to establish themselves in the English uplands."

A charity is trying to raise more than £3m to buy an ancient Lincolnshire woodland.

The Woodland Trust said it had until December to purchase Harrison Woodlands near Louth.

The trust said the 483 acre (195 hectare) forest was recorded in the Domesday Book and was home to a variety of wildlife, including goshawks and the rare, white admiral butterfly.

More than 300 harvest mice have been released at a site in the North York Moors National Park in the hope of re-establishing a local breeding population of this once-common species.

The initiative, led by Hawsker residents Steve Mills and Hilary Koll, has been supported by a grant of £4,200 from the Defra-funded Farming in Protected Landscapes scheme.

The release follows several years of habitat restoration by Steve and Hilary, who have been working with Derek Gow Consultancy – experts in UK small mammals – to ensure the right environment for the mice. The couple purchased the ‘wild and windy’ pasture field around five years ago, and have since planted trees, built ponds and watched as a habitat full of birds, butterflies and bees has slowly developed. It was a chance bit of research, however, which led Hilary down the path of harvest mice reintroduction.

Woodland Trust Scotland has launched a campaign to raise the next generation of lone trees and micro woods on farms and crofts.

Woodland Trust Scotland director Alastair Seaman said:

"As in so many cases where our woods and trees are concerned, some of the big old ones are still going strong, but there are not enough young small ones coming up to replace them.

"It's three fields and lots of wet bits in between".

That is a wildlife trust's description of Betchcott Hill, a bit of land in the Shropshire Hills it has just purchased.

It now needs to raise more than £130,000 by the end of the year to help restore the habitat, home to many species of wildlife. The hope is that it can help boost the numbers of some declining species.

"It’s a wonderful place, it’s a wonderful bit of landscape with some fantastic views, but it’s also got some amazing habitats and some really interesting species," said Tom Freeland, Shropshire Wildlife Trust's head of nature reserves.

A wildlife expert has issued an appeal to Londoners amid a “sharp increase” in seal sightings in the Thames - which she says is likely to become a “new normal” in the capital.

Mary Tester, founding director of Thames Seal Watch, said there has been a sudden surge in seal sightings in the capital as more of the mammals appear to be making their way up the river and “exploring areas of London”.

She said she is anxious to avoid a repeat of the 2021 incident in which a beloved seal pup that had been named Freddie by locals had to be put down after being mauled by a dog on the shore near Hammersmith Bridge.

She has urged Londoners to keep their distance from seals if they them on shore, and to keep their dogs on leads.

Britain’s youngest national park is edging closer towards planting 100,000 trees by its 15th anniversary next year as it begins its “major nature recovery drive” this winter.

Some 20,294 trees will be planted alongside a woodland the size of five football pitches at the South Downs National Park across Sussex and Hampshire over the coming months.

Among the efforts it is hoped to restore “majestic” English elms to the land destroyed by disease by planting 400 new disease-resistant elm trees, which are key to supporting insect and butterfly species, the park said.

As well as being an important habitat for wildlife, the sites are able to sequester CO2 from the atmosphere, much in the way that forests or peat bogs do. But the UK’s salt marshes are at risk. As sea levels rise due to global warming, saltmarshes can become inundated by seawater, effectively drowning the sites. Saltmarshes have also been lost as land is claimed for agriculture. Researchers in Yorkshire, therefore, are now warning of the major impact that future losses of salt marshes could have for both carbon emissions and biodiversity. “Salt marshes provide a whole range of different benefits to the natural world and to human populations,” says Ed Garrett, assistant professor in Physical Geography in the Department of Environment and Geography at the University of York. “This ranges from being an effective flood-defence mechanism – storing water during flooding – to reducing the energy of incoming waves, thereby reducing coastal erosion. They provide a biodiversity hotspot as well, and are much more biologically productive than some other coastal environments. “But salt marshes are much more rare than they used to be. We now have about 450 sq km, but if we go back to the mid 1800s we had about 3,000 sq km of salt marsh. “The Humber is really depleted in its salt marsh area. Only two per cent of the Humber estuarine area is currently salt marsh, and that's against a national average of six per cent of estuarine areas, so the Humber is much lower, there are only a few small fragments left.” Garrett was one of several researchers to work on a paper published late last year on the role of saltmarshes in storing and sequestering carbon. The research found that the UK’s salt marshes currently store around 5.2 million tonnes of carbon. Should these habitats be lost, however, that carbon is at risk of being released. “When we’re talking about protection of saltmarshes, the biggest thing that could be done is to act on the climate crisis and address the causes of current sea level rise,” says Garrett.

Small patches of wildflowers sown in cities can be a good substitute for a natural meadow, according to a study which showed butterflies, bees and hoverflies like them just as much.

Councils are increasingly making space for wildflower meadows in cities in a bid to tackle insect decline, but their role in helping pollinating insects was unclear. Researchers working in the Polish city of Warsaw wanted to find out if these efforts were producing good results.

They found there was no difference in the diversity of species that visited sown wildflower meadows in cities compared with natural ones, according to the study published in the journal Ecological Entomology, and led by researchers from Warsaw University. The researchers said: “In inner-city areas, flower meadows can compensate insects for the lack of large natural meadows that are usually found in the countryside.”

A rarely seen sea creature has been spotted crawling its way along a Sussex beach.

Conservationists captured footage of the mysterious creature in a nature reserve, showing it moving slowly along the sands after high tide.

While some might think it looks like something out of a sci-fi film, the marine creature was identified as a Sea Mouse – a type of worm which can usually be found on the seabed.

After spotting the creature in Rye Harbour Nature Reserve, conservationists from Sussex Wildlife Trust returned the creature back to the sea.

As winter draws near and temperatures begin to drop, our feathered friends are facing some extra challenges to stay warm and well-fed.

With natural food sources becoming more difficult to find, they need a little extra help to make it through the cold months. Sean McMenemy, nature expert and founder of Ark Wildlife, shares his expert advice on which nutritious high-fat foods you can provide your avian companions with this winter.

A rare and protected fungus has been found at a nature reserve in Canterbury.

The Hericium erinaceus, or lion's mane fungus, has the highest level of legal protection in the UK due to its scarcity. Kent Wildlife Trust said it had been spotted by a visitor.

It is illegal in the UK to collect, uproot or destroy the fungus and anyone doing so could face six months in prison or a £5,000 fine.

Options to create an independent environment protection agency in Northern Ireland are to be considered by a panel of experts as part of a new Stormont review.

Environment Minister Andrew Muir has appointed three experts to carry out the review in a bid to strengthen environmental governance.

Muir had promised to address growing public concerns over the pollution of Northern Ireland's waterways.

It comes more than a year after the UK's biggest freshwater lake, Lough Neagh, turned green due to the growth of toxic blue-green algae.

England’s national parks face a 12% real-terms cut to their budget which would lead to mass redundancies of wardens and the closure of visitor centres and other facilities, park leaders have warned.

The chief executives told the Guardian that soon the spaces would become “paper parks” designated by a “brown sign on the motorway” and they will have to “turn the lights off, close the doors and put up closed signs” if the cuts go ahead.

The raising of employer’s national insurance by Rachel Reeves, the chancellor, in the budget will also deal the parks a devastating blow, the CEOs warned, costing them £1.3m which they say will “inevitably lead to redundancies”.

Beavers and turtle doves could be reintroduced to a North Yorkshire estate as part of a large-scale 30-year restoration and rewilding project.

The project will focus on restoring 440-acres of low-yielding, difficult to farm, agricultural land, situated in the Castle Howard Estate.

The site will form the Bog Hall Habitat Bank, providing high integrity Nature Shares for businesses to purchase and contribute to nature restoration.

People in Herefordshire are being invited to give their views on how best to protect and develop trees, hedgerows and woodlands in the county.

Ideas were needed to help inform a strategy setting out a vision facilitating better management of existing stock and "the expansion of tree cover and hedgerow networks," Herefordshire Council said.

It called for input from all sectors, including environmental and landowner groups and industries, as well as proposals from individuals.

The online consultation will run until 8 December.

The sores were unlike anything veteran anglers had seen before. Black, swollen and blister-like, they started appearing on fish being caught in the River Severn in early summer.

For anglers who spend many hours on the banks of the Severn around Shrewsbury, the blistering skin was yet another warning that the river, and its wildlife and habitats, are suffering.

35 UK and EU conservation organisations1 including the RSPB, BirdLife Europe and Central Asia, Oceana UK, Wildlife and Countryside Link, and The Wildlife Trusts, have today issued a joint statement urging the Commission to reconsider its position and instead support this key ecosystem recovery measure in the interest of turning around the health of our beleaguered seas.

Sandeels are a key part of the UK ocean food chain, supporting vulnerable seabird species including Puffins, Kittiwakes, and Razorbills. They are also a vital food source for seals, porpoises and whales, and important fish species like Haddock and Whiting.

In January 2024, after decades of campaigning, the UK and Scottish governments announced an end to industrial sandeel fishing in English waters of the North Sea and all Scottish waters. The closure came into effect on 26th March and is regarded by conservationists as an essential step towards protecting globally important seabird populations, wider marine biodiversity and the future of sandeel-reliant UK fishing stocks.

Robins are commonly associated with the festive season, and simply spotting one can be enough to make us feel festive. But attracting robins doesn’t have to be left to chance. According to wildlife experts, there are ways to increase your chances of seeing more of these charming birds in your garden this year.

Maria Kincaid, the head ornithologist at FeatherSnap, shares her tips for transforming your garden into a Robin Redbreast hotspot.

The first beavers to be born in Hampshire for 400 years have been officially named by the former PM's father Stanley Johnson.

Local children entered a competition to name the two baby beavers, but 'Boris' wasn't in the running, with Bobby and Barry chosen as the winning names.

The pair were born this summer in an enclosure at the 925-acre Ewhurst Park estate near Basingstoke.

Parents Chompy and Hazel were released into the enclosure in January 2023 as the first beavers in Hampshire since the 1600s.

Recent footage of the two baby beavers, called kits, shows them exploring their enclosure, eating plants and starting to learn how to gnaw and fell trees.

New drone technology was a “game-changer” for teams gathering data about seals on the Calf of Man this year, conservationists have said.

A total of 98 seal pups were recorded and monitored during the 10-week survey, which was the highest number since the recordings began in 2009.

Manx Wildlife Trust marine officer Lara Howe said the seals were “very well camouflaged against the rocks”, but thermal imaging made them “super easy to spot”.

A project to increase biodiversity in a 'boring' Somerset woodland has enjoyed a promising start.

Work is being under taken at Goblin Combe, a former plantation woodland in the north of the county, by the Avon Wildlife Trust in a bid to boost the populations of three species of bat and Hazel Dormouse.

The site was previously a timber plantation, meaning the trees "are quite young and quite dull" for wildlife, reserve manager Andy Jones said.