Colour-ringing enabled Tómas Gunnarsson to follow the lives of pairs of Black-tailed Godwits nesting near his parents’ home in Iceland. In this world, that is ruled by timing and opportunity, the pairings, divorces and re-pairings could form the plot for a TV soap-opera. The studies turned into a fascinating Nature paper that was written up in The Telegraph newspaper. The two main characters were christened Gretar and Sigga by the journalist but they’re more commonly known as RY-RO and RO-RO.
Click here to read the rest of the article: Black-tailed Godwit pairs – the importance of synchrony | wadertales
Britain’s most important seahorse colony is under threat from plans to drill for oil.
It’s 11th January 2018 as I write this, sadly my last day of work for the Blooms for Bees project (though I will stay in touch with the project and continue to support Gemma and Judith in any way I can). One of the big winter jobs for Judith and I was analysing the data you all sent in. As verifier, I was interested in the number of 
NNBW takes place each year from 14-21 February, and after more than 19 years it is now an established part of the ornithological calendar.
Weather wise 2017 proved to be a mixed bag and started with a nice spring which caused many butterflies to emerge early, in fact some of the spring butterfly species emerged two weeks earlier than they had the year before. Unfortunately despite the year being one of the warmest on record the weather took a serious turn for the worst during late June when high winds hit the county and then unsettled conditions dominated as the storms battering the USA made their way across the Atlantic to us.
If you do a Google search for “Darwin bird” you will find endless references to the finches of the Galápagos Islands. But it took a long time for Charles Darwin to recognize their significance. When he collected them he did not even realize that they were related, considering some to be “grosbeaks,” others true finches, and others blackbirds. He even considered one warblerlike finch to be a kind of wren.
Chris Packham explores how wildlife thrives in suburban gardens over the four seasons.
A soggy mound amid the grass stopped me in my tracks. I had spent the best part of an hour searching the heathland reserve, eyes to the ground, before I chanced across it close to a clump of gorse. It was nothing much to look at, admittedly. After a winter of heavy downpours the dome-shaped structure covered with tiny snippets of vegetation had slumped so that it resembled a spadeful of old lawn clippings. Yet beneath the bedraggled thatch was buried treasure: an exceptionally rare colony of narrow-headed ants (
Where do Wrens find their winter food? It helps to know what they eat, how and where they find it! The Wren, (Troglodytes, troglodytes), when it can it feeds upon invertebrate prey such as insects,…
The new study, which examined the impact of extreme climatic events on UK butterfly populations over the period 1976-2012, found, for the first time, that extreme winter warmth had significant detrimental effects in just over half of the 41 species studied.
Skokholm is a small island off the coast of Wales with internationally important breeding populations of seabirds. The island houses the third largest colony of Manx Shearwaters in the world (15% of the global population) and holds 20% of Europe’s population of storm petrels. Rightly so, these species, and other nesting seabirds, have been the focus of conservation action on the island and Skokholm is a National Nature Reserve for this reason. However, the smaller landbirds of the island have often been overlooked, yet the island has a remarkable long-term historical record of such birds. This talk presents some of the findings of recent research into the landbirds of Skokholm and the lessons they hold for ecological theory and conservation more generally.
If you’re one of the many people who have a fear of spiders, going back in time 100 million years apparently wouldn’t have done you any good. A new, bizarre spider-like creature has just been discovered in Southeast Asia, having been encased in amber during the Cretaceous period some 100 million years ago, and it might be more terrifying than any of the creepy-crawlies lurking in the dark corners of your basement.
It’s a summer night near a forest lake in Germany and something unnatural is going on. Beyond the dark waters lapping at the shores, a faint glow emanates from rings of light hovering above the surface. Nearby, bobbing red torchlights — the least-disruptive part of the visible spectrum — betray the presence of scientists on the shoreline. They are testing what happens when they rob the lake creatures of their night.
The bobbing white blooms of 
The report by People’s Trust for Endangered Species (PTES) and the British Hedgehog Preservation Society (BHPS), indicates worrying declines of Hedgehogs in our countryside, but paints a slightly happier picture about urban areas.
Before they return to Iceland in April or early May, wintering Black-tailed Godwits have got a lot of extra feeding to do, both to fuel their journeys north and to undertake a complete change of body feathers. The grey plumage that has protected them since the autumn is discarded, to be replaced by summer finery. Although more colourful, these feathers provide cryptic camouflage in the habitats in which the birds nest – and they have less odour too.
Long strips of bright wildflowers are being planted through crop fields to boost the natural predators of pests and potentially cut pesticide spraying.
You can download “A vascular Plant Red List for England 
Waders breeding in Chukotka, in the north-east corner of Russia, have a long way to travel at the end of the summer, in search of suitable habitats in which to spend the non-breeding season. A new study, using geolocators, shows that Ringed Plovers from this area fly between 8,900 and 12,100 km each autumn and in a very different direction to most other shorebirds that breed in the same area.
Modest levels of pollution found in many English rivers are having a devastating impact on mayflies, new research suggests, killing about 80% of all eggs.
One of the joys of being a father is being able to drive your family to distraction. Few habits annoy mine more than me using my mobile phone to jot down the birds I see and hear on walks and then send the data to the British Trust for Ornithology’s BirdTrack.
It was July 10, 2016 when Dan Lane, Fernando Angulo, Jesse Fagan, and I rolled into the coffee-growing town of Flor de Café in north-central Peru. This town lies in the Cordillera Azul—a picturesque series of outlying Andean ridges hardly explored by ornithologists. In fact, the first ornithological inventory in the region was only in 1996, when a team of researchers from the Louisiana State University Museum of Natural Science (LSUMNS), bushwhacked into the extremely remote eastern Cordillera Azul. It was on this expedition that Dan, then a beginning graduate student at LSU, discovered the distinctive Scarlet-banded Barbet (Capito wallacei) on “Peak 1538”. Now, twenty years later, we were back to see this iconic species, which graces the cover of the Birds of Peru field guide.
A recent study on spider silk is providing promising possibilities for the way hearing aid microphones will be able to manage background noise — and may even change the way you look at the eight-legged creatures the next time you encounter one. The fiber they spin could be the future of directional microphone technology in hearing aids, improving the quality of sound wearers experience across all frequencies.
Wisdom, a Laysan albatross and the world’s oldest known breeding bird in the wild, has returned to 
Mike Fay explores our long relationship with mistletoe, and delves into its biological peculiarities.
The BTO longevity record for a wader is held by an Oystercatcher that was ringed as a chick by Adrian Blackburn in Lincolnshire (east coast of England) on 14 June 1970 and last caught by the Wash Wader Ringing Group on 16 July 2010, in virtually the same bit of the county. The time between ringing and last capture was 40 years 1 month and 2 days. Perhaps the bird is still alive?
Worldwide, hedgehogs are disappearing at the same rate as tigers.
A global campaign is being launched to turn a huge tract of the seas around the Antarctic into the world’s biggest sanctuary, protecting wildlife and helping the fight against climate change.
It turns out mushrooms aren’t just great to eat – they played an essential role in creating an atmosphere suitable for animal life, according to a new study. The earliest plants to dwell on land did not have well developed roots or vascular systems. Fungi, among the earliest colonizers of land, helped facilitate the transfer of phosphorus from rocky soil to primitive 
Want to do one thing to dramatically increase the wildlife of a place? Create a pond!
The BTO’s BirdTrends report is a one-stop shop for information about the population status of the common breeding birds of the wider UK countryside. The report is based on data gathered by the many thousands of volunteers who contribute to BTO-led surveys.
The ecologist, John Box, would like your help to identify locations where mistletoe is growing on oak trees.
Scientists and many bird enthusiasts have long assumed that Bullfinches mate for several years, and perhaps even for life.
Human body lice, rather than rat fleas, spread plague during the Black Death, a study simulating the outbreak suggests.
Scotland’s rainforests may be less widespread than their tropical namesakes but are just as threatened due to foreign invaders.
Between November 2015 and February 2016 an amazing 5,183 households across Britain and Ireland took part in our Goldfinch Feeding Survey to help us determine what it is about our gardens Goldfinches are attracted to. With households seeing an average of eight Goldfinches at a time, the survey highlighted the fact that the population of this colourful bird has been increasing in gardens and is now reported by 70% more Garden BirdWatch participants than twenty years ago.
Issue 6 of LifeCycle features articles on whoosh netting in your garden, spring trapping Red Kites and developing a nestbox project for Willow Tits. There is also a review of a new sexing and ageing guide for ducks, a tester’s view of Demography Online as well as details of how to get involved in a new research project on Blackcaps.
British Nature Guides have released insect identification worksheets for children aged 5-7 years.
Study of yellow warblers across North America suggests birds may be better able to adapt to global warming if their genes favour exploring newer, more hospitable habitats
You may be most familiar with the flies that hover around your fruit basket or kitchen. But some of these insects have the most unusual lifestyles on Earth. There are the “thuggish” robber flies, capable of killing hummingbirds; the delicate and nearly invisible midges that pollinate cocoa plants; and an assortment of bot flies that can live under human skin, inhabit the stomachs of rhinos, or dwell in the nasal cavities of reindeer. Erica McAlister, senior curator at the Natural History Museum in London, affectionately refers to these flies as ‘snotbots.’
It is easy to dismiss the Blackbird as just another common, year-round, garden resident. But to do so would overlook some fascinating behaviours. Research, for example, has revealed that at least 12% of the Blackbirds present in Britain and Ireland during the winter are immigrants from elsewhere in Europe and, far from just feeding on fruit and earthworms, Blackbirds have even been observed to take tadpoles and newts from the shallows of garden ponds.
David Attenborough talks about his admiration for the achievements of Charles Darwin.
Here’s a special collection of stories about waders from Graham Appleton of Wadertails
Newly discovered fossils in Germany shed light on the emergence of butterflies and moths.
What you see is not what others see. We inhabit parallel worlds of perception, bounded by our interests and experience. What is obvious to some is invisible to others. I might find myself standing, transfixed, by the roadside, watching 
The network said there were already 4,000 farmers across the UK committed to nature friendly farming.
