UK Nature and Environment

Conservationists in Scotland have kicked off a unique four-month ‘Easter egg hunt’ involving one of the UK’s rarest and most beautiful moths.

A team led by the Royal Zoological Society of Scotland (RZSS) have released 400 eggs of the dark bordered beauty moth at a specially selected site in the Cairngorms National Park as part of a conservation programme. They will return to look for the adults in July.

The dark bordered beauty moth (Epione vespertaria) is an attractive moth. Females have lemon-yellow wings and prominent dark borders while males are darker and with ochre stripes. Sadly, due to years of habitat loss, it is now endangered in the UK and found at only two sites in Scotland and one in England.

On 28 March, Clocaenog Forest welcomed a female named Maple from Wildwood Devon, and another female from Wildwood Kent arrived on 10 April.

These translocations form part of the ongoing Magical Mammals project, which aims to strengthen native red squirrel populations in North Wales. The Magical Mammals project has received funding from National Lottery Heritage Fund.

The translocation process follows a careful acclimatisation protocol to ensure the squirrels’ wellbeing and successful integration. Initially, they undergo a two-week acclimatisation period in a purpose built enclosure. During this time, the Red Squirrel Ranger and Clocaenog Red Squirrel Trust (CRST) volunteers conduct daily welfare checks, monitoring food consumption and overall health. Trail cameras capture footage for off-site review, minimising disturbance. Volunteers look for signs of feeding and activity to assess the squirrels' adjustment.

I first encountered coastal wildflowers when I was 11. I was visiting my grandmother’s friend in Devon and a lady said: “Here, dear,” and dug up a clump of Warren crocuses – a rare plant that, at the time, was only thought to grow in the seaside resort of Dawlish Warren. She gave them to me to grow in my garden at home. But of course they didn’t grow away from the sea.

That was when I realised there was something special about coastal wildflowers. They fascinate me because, as well as being beautiful flowers, they often grow in tough locations. Take the rock sea-spurrey: a delicate little plant that appears to grow out of solid rock, such as a crevice in a cliff base. It can put up with being splashed with sea spray and baked by the summer sun. And yet it seems to thrive in that difficult, harsh environment.

There’s even one plant – the slender centaury – that lives on a landslip, which is a dangerous place to live. The only place you can find it is on the cliffs of Dorset on the Jurassic Coast, which are always falling into the sea. Yet somehow it manages to survive.

A new poll has revealed that the Welsh public wants to see urgent action taken to protect wildlife.

The Omnibus survey, undertaken by Beaufort Research, revealed that 74% of people in the country agreed there should be targets set in law for nature. Meanwhile, 77% would like to see more nature thriving in local green spaces – and 76% believe that current and future governments need to take more action to tackle the loss of nature.

The most recent report on the State of Nature in Wales showed that one in six species are threatened with extinction nationally and there has been a 20% decline in Wales' wildlife since 1994. Earlier this year, the damning report questioned the Welsh government's promises to tackle nature loss and increase biodiversity in the country.

The 30-metre ridge runs across the moor near Yar Tor on Dartmoor, one of several faint lines that crisscross the land like aeroplane contrails. Although the open moorland looks wild, we are standing on some of the UK’s oldest farmland. These ridges, called reaves, are the ghosts of farming’s most wildlife-rich legacy: hedges.

“These reaves sadly have no function today other than to delight us. Or some of us,” says ecologist Rob Wolton. But Dartmoor’s reaves are the skeletons upon which more recent hedges were built: hundreds of thousands of miles of them. After Ireland, the UK is believed to be the most hedge-dense country in the world, and Wolton says the majority of them are more than 280 years old. Recent laser scanning shows England has enough hedges to wrap around the world almost 10 times. They are, by far, the country’s biggest nature reserve, which is why community groups, farmers and charities are rallying together to plant hedges of the future that will offer the same support to wildlife as the ancient hedges of the past.

“Wouldn’t you like to do something that you knew might be there in a thousand years?” says Jon Stokes, the director of trees, science and research at the Tree Council and chair of Hedgelink, who describes planting a hedge as “one of life’s great joyful things”.

Ancient and culturally important trees in England could be given legal protections under plans set out in a UK government-commissioned report.

Sentencing guidelines would be changed so those who destroy important trees would face tougher criminal penalties. Additionally, a database of such trees would be drawn up and they could be given automatic protections, with the current system of tree preservation orders strengthened to accommodate this.

There was an outpouring of anger this week after it was revealed that a 500-year-old oak tree in Enfield, north London, had been sliced almost down to the stumps. It later emerged it had no specific legal protections, as most ancient and culturally important trees do not.

Ghosts of the ice age are being resurrected in Norfolk. When the ice sheets retreated at the end of the last ice age, mounds of ice called pingos remained underground until they thawed and the soil slumped, leaving behind shallow hollows that filled with water.

These turned into swampy wetland habitats rich in plants and wildlife and Breckland, in Norfolk, became pocked with hundreds of these pingo pools, although many of them were later filled in for farmland and became lost.

Some of the ancient pingos are being rediscovered using advanced mapping techniques and are then carefully excavated, turning them back into pools filling naturally with groundwater. Despite being buried under fields for so long, these ancient pools can resurrect themselves from historical seeds buried in the sediments of the old “ghost ponds”.

A rare otter sighting has been recorded in east London's financial hub Canary Wharf.

The reclusive creature was spotted on a dock by a security camera owned by Hannah Green and Tom Hill, who live on a boat in the area.

Elliot Newton, from rewilding organisation Citizen Zoo, said it was "absolutely fantastic" to see the otter in such a "highly urbanised" part of the capital.

Scotland’s seabird populations continue to decline according to new statistics published today by NatureScot, although the short-term trend for some seabirds is more promising.

Overall, seabird numbers fell significantly between 1986 and 2023, with the numbers breeding around our coasts now close to half of the 1986 level, when regular monitoring first started. However, short term trends show some species appear to be stabilising, albeit still at lower levels than when monitoring began.

The latest Scottish Biodiversity Indicator for Seabirds was prepared by NatureScot using data from the UK Seabird Monitoring Programme. Twenty-four species of seabirds breed in Scotland and the indicator assesses breeding numbers for 11 species, and breeding success for 12 species.

Some of the UK's rarest wildlife is being "torched alive" and pushed closer to extinction after weeks of intense grass fires, conservationists have warned.

They include endangered birds like hen harriers and water voles, which are now the UK's fastest declining mammal.

The National Trust said it believed ongoing wildfires at Abergwesyn common in Powys had destroyed "the last remaining" local breeding habitat for golden plovers - considered one of the most beautiful birds of the British uplands.

The number of so-called serious pollution incidents recorded by water companies in England is at a ten-year high, according to data obtained by campaigners.

Surfers Against Sewage said the Environment Agency data showed the number of incidents was more than double its target.

Such spills have the potential to cause damage to wildlife and illness for people making use of the country's rivers and seas.

A centuries old oak tree in Enfield has been hacked down by a Toby Carvery causing uproar among local residents and conservationists.

Enfield Council demanded police investigate the felling it considered “criminal damage”, after receiving reports on April 3 that an ancient tree in Whitewebbs Wood was found to have been cut down.

Experts carried out a full investigation of the site to assess the damage and a Tree Preservation Order has now been placed on the tree to protect it from any further damage.

The tree, referred to as the ‘Guy Fawkes Oak’ due to its proximity to the Whitewebbs House where the Gunpowder Plot was planned, is thought to have been in the top 100 of London's 600,000 oak trees in terms of its size before it was cut down.

Enfield Council released a statement earlier today to confirm they had reported the the matter to police.

It has now emerged that the owners of a nearby Toby Carvery felled the tree believing it was a “health and safety risk”.

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The paper said an arboreal expert, employed by the firm, had decreed that the tree — which stood near the pub’s car park — was dead, and that the only course of action was to cut it down. But other experts have said the tree “could have lived for another century or more.”

Standing at 6.10metres in height, the ancient tree has been listed in the Woodland Trust’s Ancient Tree Inventory as a Pedunculate oak , situated in a public park with open access.

One of the UK’s most popular songbirds is in rapid decline, and garden owners are being encouraged to share their sightings with researchers.

When Paul McCartney recorded the famous Beatles song ‘Blackbird’ at Abbey Road Studios, the distinctive sound of a singing male Blackbird was added to the final mix, courtesy of the studio’s vast collection of sound effects. This particular Blackbird had been recorded three years earlier, in a west London garden. Sadly, that most familiar of sounds has become an increasingly scarce one in and around the English capital’s green spaces in recent years, following worrying declines.

In 2024, The British Trust for Ornithology (BTO) launched a pioneering survey to try to map this rate of decline in London’s Blackbirds, and to see whether similar population slumps were occurring elsewhere across the UK.

A “robust and effective system” of protections should be developed as part of an action plan to secure the future of some of England’s most important trees, according to a new report from The Tree Council and Forest Research.

The Tree Council, the national charity that brings everyone together for the love of trees, and Forest Research, assessed the existing protections and systems in place to secure the future of some of the country’s most important trees – those deemed “irreplaceable”, and providing exceptionally high social, cultural and environmental value.

The subsequent report, Protecting trees of high social, cultural and environmental value, reveals they are only indirectly protected, with some “significant legal gaps”, and recommends the development of a “robust and effective system” to ensure they are safeguarded.

The only breeding pair of ospreys on England's south coast have laid their first egg of the season.

A webcam is monitoring the nest of female CJ7 and male 022 near Wareham, Dorset.

In 2022, the birds, which were part of a reintroduction scheme, became the first nesting pair on the south coast in 180 years.

A wildlife charity is fundraising to buy a 400-acre farm so it can rewild an area of land between Kent and Sussex.

Kent Wildlife Trust has launched a campaign to raise £500,000 to purchase Hoathly Farm in Lamberhurst, near Tunbridge Wells.

The trust says if successful, Hoathly Farm would be added to its existing wilding projects at Scotney Castle and Furnace Farm, which it already owns, to create a "near-continuous landscape for nature" connecting Kent and Sussex.

Fence posts have been put up to protect beach-nesting birds along a stretch of coast where they have struggled to breed.

The posts are on the beach from Sellafield to Drigg, in West Cumbria, and are part of a RSPB project to safeguard common ringed plover and oystercatcher birds known to nest there.

The charity said the posts were "a visual aid" to remind people of the nests, as "any human activity" on the shingle at this time of year caused "nest failures".

The posts were topped by nails to prevent predators such as crows from using them as vantage points to look for prey, the RSPB said.

Wildlife cameras have failed to explain why the last known colony of puffins on the south coast of England has failed to raise young.

In 2023, naturalists noticed that the seabirds near Swanage, Dorset, had stopped bringing fish to their nests on the cliffs.

They speculated that rats or crows had eaten the chicks.

However, motion-sensor cameras installed at the site in 2024 have recorded no predators and have not provided any other explanation, the National Trust said.

In the very English scene of a long-settled farm in the depths of the Sussex countryside, the nature writer Adam Nicolson has produced what amounts to an update of the traditional nursery rhyme Who Killed Cock Robin?. The poem performs the obsequies for the poor redbreast but is also a roll call of the other birds of old Albion: the thrush, the owl, the dove and more. In Bird School: A Beginner in the Wood, Nicolson sets out to educate himself about these species and discover why avian mortality is a considerably bigger problem now than it was when the ballad of Cock Robin was first heard.

Since the 1960s, numbers of song thrushes in the UK have fallen by 40%, from a population of approximately 100,000 to about 60,000, according to the British Trust for Ornithology. There are half as many tawny owls in our woods since the 1970s, and the decline of turtle doves is even more vertiginous: we’ve lost 90% of them in the past 60 years. (Though the robin is faring rather better: from a nadir in the mid-80s when fewer than 100,000 specimens were recorded, the ranks have swelled to a healthier 150,000 today.) In Nicolson’s lifetime, the heavens have emptied of birds: though partly as a response to this, every new publishing season finds the skies black with books about our feathered friends. There has been a spectacular murmuration of birder-authors in recent years, including Tim Dee, Stephen Moss and Deborah Cramer.

HS2's so-called bat tunnel has become a political scapegoat, used to justify rolling back environmental protections. But the real story is very different. The tunnel was not forced by conservationists or wildlife laws - it was a consequence of poor decisions made by HS2 Ltd and approved by parliament. Now, politicians are misrepresenting this history to push the Planning and Infrastructure Bill (PIB), a law that won’t fix planning delays but will put nature at greater risk.

This page breaks down the facts: what the bat tunnel really is, who approved it, and why weakening protections won’t solve the UK’s planning challenges.

For the past three decades Lakenheath Fen Nature Reserve has built a habitat for species that were once considered rare in the UK to breed and and increase in number.

The wetland reserve was created in 1995 when the Royal Society for the Protection of Birds (RSPB) bought the site, which at the time was mainly arable fields.

A mix of reed beds, marshes and woodlands now cover the 1,235-acre (500 hectares) reserve, which is encircled by Suffolk, Cambridgeshire and Norfolk.

They have bright yellow legs, are about 25mm (almost 1in) long, and a single colony, if left unchecked, can “butcher” 90,000 pollinating insects in just one season.

Since the first UK sighting in 2016 of Vespa velutina – the Asian or yellow-legged hornet – beekeepers and scientists have waged a vigorous campaign to minimise the damage this invasive species can do to Britain’s biodiversity and bee colonies.

Last year, a wet spring and washout summer appeared to have hindered the insect’s population growth as the number of nests spotted in the UK dropped from 72 in 2023 to 24 in 2024. But it was also the first year that the National Bee Unit received confirmation, via DNA, that the hornets had successfully bred and over-­wintered in the UK.

As well as talking about guerilla animal releases, this article talks about lots of amazing community rewilding action. I highly recommend it for an uplifting read!

Butterflies, birds, insects and lizards are among the many species negatively affected by a spate of recent wildfires on the Mourne Mountains.

There have been almost 300 such fires in Northern Ireland since 3 April.

The Northern Ireland Fire and Rescue Service said many were started deliberately.

National Mammal Week, brought to you by the Mammal Society, is a celebration of Britain’s mammals and an opportunity to raise awareness of the challenges they face.

One in four UK mammals are threatened with extinction, with many others in decline. The British Isles are home to many species of mammal, from the tiny pygmy shrew to the giant fin whale. And yet, mammals are some of the most under-recorded species in Britain.

From April 21st to 27th, the conservation sector, volunteers and nature-lovers come together to celebrate these remarkable creatures and raise awareness about their conservation.