GreyShuck

"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.