Labour will take on vested interests from water companies to housebuilders and farmers in an effort to restore the UK’s degraded natural environment, the party’s environment chief has said.

Steve Reed, the shadow environment secretary, said: “If the Tories want to have an election fight over that, bring it on, because the British people care about the countryside, they care about nature. They care about living in a beautiful country. They value their access to the countryside. The Conservatives are on the wrong side of all that, and to many, many voters that will tip their votes.”

My TL;DR:

Downing Street is facing calls to explain why it has appointed an unelected shooting enthusiast as its animal welfare minister after it emerged he has backed the culling of seals and wild birds.

Robbie Douglas-Miller, who was last week given a peerage to allow him to become minister in the Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs (Defra), owns a grouse moor in Scotland and has argued for the relaxation of rules on shooting wild birds that prey on salmon.

He is also on the board of a fishery which applied to obtain a licence to kill seals in 2021; last year he gained a licence to kill wild cormorants and sawbill ducks.

Furthermore, in September, he signed a letter with fellow grouse moor owners lobbying the Scottish government to water down new laws that bring in licences for grouse-shooting in an effort to address persecution of birds of prey.

Douglas-Miller was made a baron on Friday in a surprise appointment as an environment minister and given the portfolio responsibility for animal welfare this week.

My TL;DR:

Red squirrels are one of Scotland’s most beloved and most threatened woodland animals.

Red squirrels and their tree nests are protected under law. But in 2017 Forestry and Land Scotland (FLS) was granted a licence by the Scottish Government’s wildlife agency allowing dreys to be damaged during forestry operations.

FLS estimated that the “theoretical maximum” of red squirrel babies killed when their nests were destroyed during tree felling between 2017 and 2022 was 1,976.

FLS’s estimates, however, were dismissed as “bullshit” by Dave Anderson, an award-winning wildlife expert who worked for FLS and its predecessor bodies for 43 years.

What was going on within FLS was a “disgrace”, with staff being put under increasing pressure to ignore wildlife so that more money could be made from selling timber, Anderson alleged.

FLS treated the deaths of red squirrels, birds and other wildlife as “collateral damage”, he told The Ferret.

New genetic research has revealed how British otters were able to recover from species loss in the 1950s with the help of their counterparts from Asia.

Using genome sequencing data, a team from Cardiff University's Otter Project showed that much of the genetic diversity of British otters was lost when chemical pollution led to severe population declines in the 1950–1970s.

The paper, "Genomics reveals complex population history and unexpected diversity of Eurasian otters (Lutra lutra) in Britain relative to genetic methods," was published in Molecular Biology and Evolution.

I'm feeling wistful when I see the two crimson sweet-pea buds still clinging on, in the garden. It's been around two weeks now. It doesn't look like they're going to bloom. I can't remember seeing them this late in the year before.

About 100,000 trees will be planted across Sussex and Hampshire this winter, the National Park Authority has announced.

As part of the scheme to help disease-hit woodlands flourish, the South Downs National Park will have 23,000 new trees.

“Our tree-scape supports a wealth of wildlife, from rare insects to nesting birds and complex fungi," said Nick Heasman, a countryside and policy manager for the park.

Research from the Woodland Trust shows that one third of all woodland species in the UK are in decline and one in 10 is at risk of extinction.

The newly planted trees will replace plants lost to pests and diseases such as ash dieback and Dutch elm disease.

England will get a new national park as part of a government set of "nature pledges" to give greater access and protection to the countryside.

Natural England will consider a list of possible sites, which could include the Chilterns, the Cotswolds and Dorset.

Some environmentalists gave the news a cautious welcome, as government funding for national parks has fallen in real terms, forcing service and staff cuts.

Funding worth £15m was also announced for a range of protected landscapes.

I have just seen a few ladybirds hanging about on the branches of a fatsia shrub in my garden. They have been prolific this year. Wondering why they're not off hibernating somewhere.

The medicinal leech is one of nature’s least loved hunters. Armed with three strong interlocking jaws and with a taste for blood, they will swim hungrily towards humans, deer or cattle that wander into their ponds to bathe, fish or drink.

Yet this small predator is the focus of an unlikely reintroduction programme by conservationists working in a small laboratory deep in the Scottish Highlands, at a wildlife park best known for its polar bears, wildcats and wolves.

They want to see hundreds released into Scottish lochs and streams, in the first project to repopulate the countryside with leeches after hundreds of years of habitat loss and exploitation.

My TL;DR:

According to the RSPB, its annual compilation of confirmed cases of illegal killings of birds of prey has always been the tip of the iceberg of raptor persecution, which is mostly driven by a desire to protect game shoots involving species including red grouse, pheasants and partridges.

Since the bird flu outbreak began in Britain in 2021, hundreds of dead raptors have been sent directly to Defra for testing. In most cases, if a bird tests positive for bird flu, no further postmortem tests are undertaken.

Moreover rules prevent carcasses that test negative from being moved to other labs to be examined for signs of persecution such as shooting or poisoning.

Convictions are vanishingly rare because evidence is difficult to gather on remote estates with little public access.

Of 191 individuals convicted of bird of prey persecution-related offences from 1990 to 2022, 67.5% have been gamekeepers. Of two successful convictions in 2022, both were gamekeepers.

My TL;DR:

Experts say a series of storms in October, culminating in Storm Babet, had caused the disappearance – and likely death – of these birds.

Records for the island have been kept since the mid-1970s, and there has never been such a heavy loss.

Shags feed within a mile of the coast but strong easterly winds stirred up the sea, which meant they could not hunt for days on end. They carry little fat because it reduces their ability to dive, and so die if they do not feed regularly.

The climate crisis is likely to make these events more frequent, and more destructive.

UKCEH is calling on people to report and send photos of any dead shags with coloured rings on to [email protected].

My TL;DR:

A city farm in Bath is highlighting the creatures that would have been unheard of in the area before the climate emergency.

They were concerned to find about 30 species that have moved in or have been found there in the winter where previously they would have visited only in the summer.

Ecologist and trustee Mike Williams, who led the wildlife recording, said insects and arachnids were important indicator species that help ecologists understand the effect of a changing climate on the natural world. “Spiders are a classic example as due to their short lifespan and mobility they react to changes in weather.”

“It fascinates and saddens me,” he said. “Our wildlife surveys have shown that climate change isn’t something that will happen in the distant future. Most of the crickets you hear calling in the meadows have only been in Bath for the past 20 years or so.

This is an interesting long-form article written by Emma Marris about their journey to the Isle of Mull off the west coast of Scotland to explore the relationship between Mull's residents (especially it's hill farmers) and it's white-tailed eagles.

The hill farmers and the white-tailed eagles have a strained relationship, especially due to the belief that the white-tailed eagles take some of the farmers lambs every year. However, birding tourism to Mull is estimated to attracted up to £8 million. This tourism also benefits the farmers as many rent out vacation cottages.

It's hard for me the TL;DR this article since it takes around 20 minutes to read. However, there is an audio recording of the article that can be listened to!

My TL;DR:

More than half the seabird species breeding on British and Irish coasts have declined over the last 20 years, according to the most comprehensive census to date.

Eleven of 21 nesting seabirds species have fallen, five species have remained stable and five have increased, some because of targeted conservation work, according to the Seabirds Count survey.

British and Ireland are internationally important for seabirds, holding most of the world’s nesting Manx shearwaters, northern gannets and great skuas and more than half of the north Atlantic populations of lesser black-backed gulls and common guillemots.

Some species have declined due to climate change reducing food availability and increasing storminess at nest sites, while others have been hit by commercial fishers depleting fish populations and, in some cases, predation on land by invasive mammals such as brown rats.

cross-posted from: https://feddit.uk/post/4450355

My TL;DR:

Five years ago, when Mark Barrow started his project to film along the 65-mile River Wharfe in Yorkshire, he captured footage of majestic shoals of grayling, the fish known as “the Lady of the Stream”, some 200 or 300 strong.

Recently, Barrow returned to the same spot, near the historic Harewood House on the outskirts of Leeds, to reshoot some video because he wasn’t happy with the quality of his earlier attempt.

What he found shocked him. The water was cloudy with pollution and the numbers of grayling, with their distinctive red fins and pewter scales, were reduced to pockets of no more than 30 or 40.

As well as grayling, the Wharfe is home to perch, chub, trout, barbel and even mussels. But Barrow said that he swam through sections of the river “completely devoid of life”.

The main culprit for pollution is combined sewer overflows that empty directly into the river. “There are areas where the sediment makes visibility very poor. Where I was once seeing widespread shoals of fish, there are now just pockets of them trapped in the clean water between the sewage overflows.”

He said there were 46 such overflows on the Wharfe, and on more than one occasion, he swam by just as they discharged into the river – leaving him emerging from the water covered in human waste.

Earlier this year, Nicola Shaw, CEO of Yorkshire Water, publicly apologised about the state of the Wharfe and said the utilities company was investing £180m to build more capacity to store wastewater and reduce sewage overspills. She also said she was not taking any bonus from the company because of the situation.

My TL;DR:

Native black poplars were once common across the country. But many of its waterlogged habitats have since been drained and few native specimens were planted after the 19th century. Whenever landowners did plant native specimens, they favoured males that came without the cotton-like seed fluff produced by female flowers. Opportunities for wild specimens to reproduce naturally are consequently rare.

Black poplars are easy to multiply through taking cuttings. It’s an effective way to preserve a specific local population. But it also means the same clones now proliferate everywhere, since cuttings create exact genetic copies.

In 2018, a team of scientists published findings from DNA analyses of 811 samples of native black poplars, sent in by landowners over more than a decade. Among them, they identified only 87 genetically distinct clones, or genotypes.

That can be a problem because it leaves the species more vulnerable to disease and other threats. To make them more resilient, new trees would ideally be grown from seed, not cuttings. But because cross-pollination of black poplars now rarely occurs in nature, seeds can be hard to come by.

This conundrum has spurred a passionate effort to provide what nature cannot. Earlier this year, Zeke Marshall, a Forest Research scientist, took cuttings from a female tree in Darlington and a male one in Durham.

Once the branches flowered, he used a small paint brush to transfer the male pollen to the female flowers. He managed to harvest 205 seeds and sent most of them to Kew, where Chris Jenkins, nursery manager at the Royal Botanic Gardens, has grown about 30 seedlings. Each one is crucially a genetically distinct mix of its two parent trees.

Cottrell, the head of genetics at Forest Research, says Marshall and Jenkins’ work could be crucial. By creating new genotypes, this would eventually provide a wider spectrum of specimens for natural selection to take hold – which is particularly important in an era of both worsening climate change and increasing threats from introduced pests and diseases.

Populations of the hazel dormouse, perhaps the most elusive native British mammal, have plummeted by 70% this century.

The nocturnal, tree-dwelling animals are now extinct in 20 counties in England and the species must be reclassified as “endangered” on the International Union for Conservation of Nature red list, according to a study by the People’s Trust for Endangered Species (PTES).

Since the previous State of Britain’s Dormice report was published in 2019, they have vanished from Hertfordshire, Staffordshire and Northumberland.

Reintroducing lost species into nature-depleted Britain is ‘not a priority’, the government said last week. Enter a growing movement of guerrilla rewilders, who are secretly breeding butterflies, birds and beavers, and illegally releasing them across the country. Are they halting the tide of extinction, or doing more harm than good?

As rewilding has turned from a niche interest into a cultural phenomenon, the worsening biodiversity crisis has radicalised a growing group of ‘guerrilla rewilders’ who refuse to play by the rules, concerned by the rapid decline of nature in Britain and outraged by the government’s lack of action (last week it confirmed that bringing back lost species is “not a priority”).

Hundreds of native plants and animals have vanished over the past two centuries alone in Britain. Recent analysis by researchers found that one in six of Britain’s surviving species is now threatened with extinction. A study by the Natural History Museum put the UK in the bottom 10 per cent of the world’s countries when it comes to biodiversity intactness.

Guerrilla rewilding has not only drawn the ire of typical opponents of species releases, like farmers, but also faces strong criticism from established conservation groups and many ecologists. They warn that guerrilla rewilders like Simon risk spreading diseases and altering fragile ecosystems. They also fear that setting free controversial species, like beavers, will simply get the animals killed and further polarise the debate over nature restoration.

In England, you have to apply for a licence to release any species no longer present in the wild, from the Eurasian elk, which died out in the 13th century, to the short-haired bumblebee, declared extinct in 2000. The same goes for a number of native species that have already been reintroduced, but which the government says could cause conflict or be compromised by “poorly planned” releases, such as barn owls, wild boar, red kites and white-tailed eagles.

“I think anyone involved in these things would be much happier to do it legitimately. But it’s made almost impossible by government to do so,” says Ben Goldsmith, a financier and environmentalist who has long supported rewilders like Gow, including financially, and has wild beavers on his own land in Somerset.

UK forests are heading for “catastrophic ecosystem collapse” within the next 50 years due to multiple threats including disease, extreme weather and wildfires, researchers have warned, with trees dying on a large scale.

The study, published in the journal Forestry, was put together by a panel of 42 researchers, with 1,200 experts consulted. Lead author, Dr Eleanor Tew, head of forest planning at Forestry England and visiting researcher at the University of Cambridge, described the finding as “sobering and alarming”.

Bradshaw is the chief caretaker of some of the country’s rarest flowers. She has spent seven decades obsessively studying the unique arctic-alpine flora of Teesdale, in the north of England.

Where once [these flora] were widespread in Britain, now only fragments remain, and 28 species are threatened with extinction.

“Everything about Teesdale is unique,” says Bradshaw with pride – and the authority of someone who has just written a 288-page book on the subject.

[...]

Since the 1960s, plant abundance has dropped by 54% on average. Some have essentially disappeared, such as the dwarf milkwort, down by 98%, and the hoary whitlow-grass, down by 100% (there is now just one recorded plant). Her data suggests these “shocking” declines are continuing.

Bradshaw sees those declines as British heritage disappearing. She says: “We’ve got various buildings in the country – Stonehenge, Durham Cathedral, and others; if they were crumbling away, there would be groups and money helping stop it, because people would say: ‘We can’t let this happen.’

Despite Bradshaw’s guardianship of this land, and the love and energy she has put into saving it, the future here is unknown. The last words of her book speak to this unrelenting loss. “This is our heritage, this unique assemblage of plant species, mine and yours,” she writes. “In spite of trying, I have failed to prevent its decline, now it is up to you.”

cross-posted from: https://lemm.ee/post/13187701

Work is underway to restore rare a rare lowland heathland habitat in a forest in the Vale of Glamorgan.

Lowland heathland is a threatened habitat mainly found in north-west Europe and characterised by heathers, gorse and grasses.

The UK has lost 80% of this important habitat during the last two centuries, but still retains 20% of the world’s lowland heathland.

Campaigners fear the change of approach could lead to more pollution in England’s rivers and waterways if the new measuring methods are less rigorous.

Recent analysis found that many toxic chemicals and pesticides banned in the bloc since Brexit are not outlawed for use in the UK. Ministers are also attempting to rip up EU-derived sewage pollution rules for housebuilders.

In 2019, the last time the full water assessments took place, just 14% of rivers were in good ecological health and none met standards for good chemical health.

The Guardian can reveal that the government will be using its own, as yet undisclosed methodology to assess river health. Activists say this may make it harder to compare the state of the country’s rivers against those in the EU, and will leave the public in the dark over pollution from sewage and agriculture.

Vast expanses of rolling hilltops may be easy on the eye. But look a bit closer and many are in fact bleak landscapes – overgrazed and mostly devoid of diverse natural life. Shortsighted agricultural practices, habitat destruction and factory farming are among the causes of an alarming biodiversity crisis in Britain, where one in six species are in danger of local extinction.

Around the edges, however, local wildlife restoration projects are having an impact. Last year, 3.22% of the UK’s land was deemed to be well protected and managed, according to Wildlife Trusts, a slight increase on 2021, and councils are embracing rewilding. More and more community and private projects appear to be springing up too.

The nature restoration project Back on Our Map is one of these. Working in and around the Lake District, it has restored habitats across a series of protected areas from Morecambe Bay to Grizedale Forest, reintroducing species such as the seriously endangered hazel dormouse. It released 69 of the rodents in June 2021, which have since bred, with more than 100 juvenile dormice found in subsequent surveys.

There were also 64 small blue butterflies translocated from a nearby coastal site to widen the population’s geographic range. “Each butterfly was released by a young person from a local primary school,” says Anya Kuliszewski, a community engagement officer. “It was a lovely way of involving the next generation of wildlife enthusiasts.”

A former tree of the year that was chopped down to make way for HS2 is alive and well, regrowing from its transplanted stump.

The pear tree in Cubbington, Warwickshire, thought to be more than 250 years old, became a cause célèbre when it was first threatened with destruction. Despite having won the tree of the year award in 2015 and thousands having signed a petition to save it, the tree was felled in 2020 by HS2 contractors.

...

It was feared that attempts to keep alive the much-loved tree – growing in a hedge beside an ancient woodland and thought to be the second oldest pear in Britain – would fail because its trunk was hollow.

But to the delight of local people, the stump and root ball, which was moved by contractors and replanted in a field 100 metres from its original location, is vigorously sprouting new shoots and leaves.

...

According to locals, the stump is regrowing because it had the good fortune to be planted in heavy clay soils that stayed moist during recent dry summers. Dry conditions have killed off thousands of young saplings planted by HS2 contractors in mitigation for line-cutting through the ancient South Cubbington Wood.

...

Despite pleas by residents and conservationists for a tunnel under the pear and South Cubbington Wood, the high-speed line has cut through the ancient wood. In mitigation for the loss of 2 hectares of ancient woodland, HS2 has planted 60,000 new trees on 17 hectares of land around the wood, with 6 hectares of broadleaved trees linking it to the River Leam corridor.

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The Cubbington pear also lives on across the village of Cubbington, thanks to local people who obtained the assistance of an expert in grafting ancient pears.

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While HS2 proclaims the success of one of its controversial environmental measures, Cubbington residents prefer to see the pear’s survival as a sign of the resilience of nature.

“It’s sort of two fingers to HS2,” said Guiot.

“Photographs are a powerful tool for strengthening our understanding of whale movements and the threats they face – providing vital evidence for effective conservation,” said Dr Lauren Hartny-Mills, science and conservation manager for the Hebridean Whale and Dolphin Trust.

The trust is asking for members of the public to submit their photos – whether recent or historic – to help its scientists learn more about the whales’ movements, health and the threats they face.