Meadow flowers by Peter Hassett, Sharpenhoe Clappers 4 August 2019
Manicured privets and immaculate lawns are a thing of the past. Nowadays, it’s all about “ungardening”: eschewing toxic pesticides or sterile patio decking to create gardens that will encourage native wildlife to live and flourish. Rewilding, as it’s more commonly known, has been growing in popularity across Europe and the US, as green-fingered activists use their skills to reverse ecological decline and encourage the growth of native species. But how best to turn the average British garden into an idyll for birds, mammals and, yes, even bugs? Wildlife gardening expert Jenny Steel weighs in.
Click here to read the rest of the article.: The rise of ‘ungardening’: how to turn a backyard into a wildlife haven | News | The Guardian
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What wonderful speakers there were at Hen Harrier Day! We don’t have images of them all, but here are some. If you have images of any of the missing ones (!) we’d love to be able to use them and credit them to you.
‘It makes no sense to direct public subsidies to estates that are systematically damaging the country’s biggest carbon sink’
‘Ruthless cull’: Hundreds of thousands of animals being killed on private estates to protect grouse shooting, Chris Packham
The £1m project in the Fens will test out crops which could help preserve peat and store carbon
Blog from the RSPB’s Guy Shorrock on Hen Harrier Day 2019
Reports of a Japanese knotweed hybrid which has the potential to out-compete native vegetation are on the rise, it has been warned.The invasive “bohemian knotweed” is produced by cross fertilisation between Japanese knotweed and giant knotweed and can be more vigorous than its parent plants, according to experts.
Labour has called for a review of grouse shooting, saying it damages important natural habitats.
The Black Hairstreak butterfly has held a special place in my heart for almost as long as I’ve held an interest in butterflies. Their specific needs making them a real Northamptonshire speciality coupled together with the elusiveness making them a challenge to study only make the species more appealing to me. The Black Hairstreak was one of the first species of butterfly I made a special trip to see when many years I ago I headed to Glapthorn hoping that I’d bump into someone who knew what they were doing and show me where to see them.
In a first for UK marine conservation, underwater cameras have been used to observe the behaviour of basking sharks in the Inner Hebrides.
Seeing Chequered Skippers flying once again in their former English strongholds has been a dream of mine since I was a child. I grew up in Northamptonshire in a house that backed on to fields and while exploring the seemingly endless natural world beyond the back gate I developed a fascination for butterflies. I kept this interest in butterflies into my adult life and I now find myself as the Northamptonshire County Butterfly Recorder. It was during my early studies of butterflies that I first came across the Chequered Skipper, but only in a book as the species became extinct in England two years before I was born. I was saddened to read the accounts of its disappearance from its former strongholds here and I was amazed to learn how rapidly a species can decline and disappear in a short space of time.
Water Works Project Awarded £1 million
A new interactive online tool is set to encourage tree planting initiatives across the UK. It calculates how much pollution would be removed by planting trees in local areas, as well as the corresponding public health cost savings.
In a victory for hedgehog conservation, new planning laws require small holes be included in the base of fences in new developments, creating ‘highways’ that enable hedgehogs to roam freely.
In the summer of 2018, the University of Cambridge and the Wildlife Trust for Bedfordshire, Cambridgeshire and Northamptonshire began a new project to assess the impacts of climate change on butterfly species living on some of the Trusts’ most important reserves. Butterflies are abundant, easy to survey, and sensitive to environmental change, making them an ideal group to study and understand how individuals and communities might respond to our warming climate.
Seeds of a wildflower so rare it is only found in a handful of sites are being “baked” in the sun after last year’s heatwave boosted its survival.
The census found 2,967 wild tigers across India in 2018, compared with 2,226 in 2014 — an increase of more than a third.
As travelling in the 21st century is easier than ever, so is for species to make their way to new areas, sometimes increasing their distributional range, or even establishing whole new habitats. On the other hand, when they leave their natural predators and competitors behind, and find abundance of suitable resources somewhere else, they are running the risk of becoming invasive.
Large clouds of painted lady butterflies are being spotted across the UK and Ireland – and experts believe we are seeing a mass emergence that happens every 10 years.
We’ve lost over half the number of Cuckoos in the UK over the last 20 years. Since 2011 we’ve been satellite-tracking Cuckoos to find out why. We’ve learned lots of vital information which could help us to understand our Cuckoos – such as how the different routes taken are linked to declines, and some of the pressures they face whilst on migration. But there is still more to discover. We now need to look more closely at how dependent they are on, and how much their migration is linked, to the drought-busting rains of the weather frontal system known as the Inter Tropical Convergence Zone (ITCZ) as they move out of the Congo rainforest and begin to head back to the UK via West Africa. Follow our Cuckoos as they move to and from Africa.
Early return to breeding areas is widely acknowledged to be ‘a good thing’ but why? Some people suggest that early migrants can choose the best territories, others argue that early chicks have a disproportionately high chance of fledging but there are other explanations too. In their paper in Ecology & Evolution, Catriona Morrison and her colleagues ask how much of the advantage of being an early migrant could be associated with having an option to nest again, if the first attempt fails.
In a changing world, with more chaotic weather patterns and rapidly altering habitats, migratory birds are faced with opportunities and challenges. Long-term monitoring of colour-ringed Black-tailed Godwits, during a period of range expansion and phenological change, has revealed that individuals behave consistently over time but that the behaviour of new generations is moulded by the conditions they encounter.
Huge swarms of flying ants in the south of England have appeared on a weather forecast map looking like rain.
Puffins are being hunted 100 at a time by trophy collectors who are allowed to bring the carcasses back to the UK, despite the government’s efforts to save the species.
You may remember the Heritage Lottery Funded Box Woodland Project (2013 – 2015) led by Sarah Wright which introduced many of us to the rich cultural history of the Chilterns Box Woodland. The largest native Box Woodland in the UK can be found near Great Kimble and remnants of other Box Woods, sometimes existing as an understorey to other woodlands, can be found scattered across the Chilterns. The slow growing dense wood has been used for centuries for engraving, medieval woodwind musical instruments, early printing blocks and lace-makers bobbins, used locally to produce the famous Bucks Point Lace. Click here to learn more about Chilterns Box Woodlands.
England’s House Sparrow population fell by 70% between 1977 and 2016, and this once ubiquitous species is now absent from many urban areas. New research involving the BTO has found evidence that malarial parasites may be linked to this species’ decline.
Butterfly numbers have dropped by one-third in the past two decades in the US, echoing declines seen in Europe. These figures raise alarm bells for the health of other insect populations, because butterflies face similar environmental changes and are used as a proxy for studying insects in general.
There are some plants we all know at first glance, the bright red poppy, or the tiny daisy, but could you tell the difference between upright hedge parsley and burnet saxifrage? If you came across a beautiful wildflower, on a walk in a woodland or amongst unmown grass in your local park, how would you go about finding out what it is?
In July 2018 there was a call for people to express their opinions on the issue of hunting Black-tailed Godwits and Curlews in France. This blog aimed to bring together some background to inform the discussion. The government decided to maintain the current situation until 30 July 2019: to shoot Curlew in some circumstances but to maintain a ban on shooting Black-tailed Godwits. A new Curlew decree has been published and a final decision is expected shortly as to what will happen when the shooting season reopens in August (2019). There is a link to the proposals at the end of this blog.
A third of the UK’s wild bee and hoverfly species are declining. Olivia Norfolk explores how roadside wildflowers are saving wildlife across the nation
Researchers studying reptile evolution have reconstructed the skull of a possible common ancestor.
A study carried out by the Zoological Society of London (ZSL) found that about 70 per cent of hard coral populations were decimated after extreme periods of high temperatures over two years.
The pups were stolen from one pack, and then raised with the young from a rival pack in this rare display of abduction behaviour.
Wildflower-rich meadows are very rare and important habitats. Some of these grasslands support an amazing number of wildflower species as well as providing habitats for many species of birds, invertebrates, amphibians and mammals. In particular they provide very important supplies of pollen and nectar for bumblebees and other insect pollinators.
Can small isolated patches of habitat really offset the damage we are doing to our environment? Professor of biodiversity and conservation Kevin Gaston provides the answer.
The UK public has been asked to take part in the world’s largest butterfly count, to see if the nation is experiencing a once-in-a-decade phenomenon.
Covering less than 1% of UK land, these remaining isolated fragments are home to an unprecedented richness of species; hundreds of different wild flowers and fungi have co-evolved over millennia with farmers managing the land as hay meadows and pasture. This unparalleled plant diversity provides the life support for our invertebrates, birds, mammals.
A conservation partnership is underway to create a Mother Oyster Sanctuary in 
Every year, 40-50 million non-native gamebirds (ring-necked pheasant Phasianus colchius and red-legged partridge Alectoris rufa) are released in the UK, equivalent to around 46000 tonnes of biomass. Fewer than half these birds are shot, with the remaining birds predated, scavenged or surviving to breed or to be predated in subsequent years. This means there is potentially a large food resource available to predators and scavengers; a resource that has increased year-on-year as the numbers released have grown.
Much of Britain has been basking in glorious sunshine recently. But how do frogs, toads and newtsreact to an exceptional run of hot weather and no rain? It can be a mixed blessing. On the positive side, warmer temperatures in summer can help in a number of ways. Of course, as amphibians rely on external sources of heat; hot weather means they can be active more of the time. It may also mean that their prey are more active and possibly more numerous. Temperature has a crucial influence on the development of amphibian tadpoles (technically known as larvae). Essentially, warmer ponds means faster development for tadpoles. In some years when temperatures are high early in the year we’ve noticed froglets and toadlets emerging earlier from ponds at many sites. We suspect that the emergence of efts (the term for land-based young newts after they transform from larvae) will be earlier in many ponds in those years – this typically happens a couple of months later than frogs and toads.
Last month was the hottest June ever recorded, the 
Geolocators* have provided fantastic information about the movements of migratory birds – making links between countries, revealing previously unknown stop-over sites and indicating just how quickly birds traverse our planet. A small number of Icelandic Whimbrel have carried geolocators for up to six annual cycles, providing Camilo Carneiro with an opportunity to investigate the annual consistency of egg-laying, autumn departure, arrival in West Africa, departure in the spring, stopover in Western Europe and arrival back in Iceland.
The first Blooms for Bees journal paper ‘Evaluating the ability of citizen scientists to identify bumblebee (Bombus) species’ has been published in PLOS One this week. You can read the full paper on the 
Most people are familiar with honey bees and bumblebees, but look closely and there are smaller furry bees moving from flower to flower. There are around 20,000 described bee species worldwide. Most of these bees are known as solitary bees with only 250 bumblebee species, 9 honey bee species and a number of social stingless bees worldwide. In Britain we have around 270 species of bee, just under 250 of which are solitary bees. These bees can be amazingly effective pollinators and as the name suggests tend not to live in colonies like bumblebees and honey bees.
Around 16,500 species have been recorded on RSPB reserves, of which more than 3,000 are of conservation concern.
An RSPB blog:
Japan is about to resume catching whales for profit, in defiance of international criticism.
While many birds enjoy feasting on the treats hidden in garden bird feeders, what do they eat in the wild?
Today the charity I work for, People Need Nature, publishes its latest report, investigating the tax system and how it affects farmland. “Where there’s muck there’s brass: revealing the billions hidden in farmland tax shelters” lays out the many, varied, and some frankly bizarre tax breaks available to farmers and landowners. And we argue that these are providing no benefit to society, and in some cases are operating against things society might want.
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