Thanks to the drought, these black-and-white beauties are struggling to catch worms in the rock-hard earth. But there’s still good foraging on well-watered fairways and greens

"I've never been so excited to see a poo," says urban rewilding officer Pia Trevelyan-Ashby.

She holds out a small Tic Tac-shaped dropping from a water vole and smiles. "This is what success looks like."

She has been on the hunt for evidence of the water vole population in the Hogsmill River in Surrey.

Four decades of protection are allowing native woodland and wider ecosystems to regenerate naturally on one of Scotland’s great wild landscapes

One of the UK's most important wild places is showing encouraging signs of woodland recovery. Recent field observations on John Muir Trust land at Lì and Coire Dhorrcail on the Knoydart peninsula, north-west of Scotland, reveal widespread natural regeneration of native woodland.

The findings are the latest milestone in the John Muir Trust's long-term work to protect, restore and expand native woodland on Knoydart - one of the most remote parts of the UK, and where the story of the Trust began.

A hidden population of one of England's rarest moths has been found at a site where it had not been seen for more than 70 years.

Head of conservation at Butterfly Conservation Dr Dave Wainwright has spent his career searching for the dark bordered beauty and said he felt an "overwhelming feeling of relief" when they were found at Wallington estate, in Northumberland.

For decades, the only site where the moth was found in England was at Strensall Common, in Yorkshire, but the population there has been in decline due to climate change and a wildfire.

British summers have long been associated with barbequing under an umbrella and soggy summer picnics. Historically, ours has been a wet country. But I fear that is not the case anymore.

Our upland moors, those fantastically mossy sponges that provide much of our drinking water, have been drained, degraded and dried out. Our lowland fens have been stripped of their watery character. Every major river in England has been diverted, channelled, or dredged to move water off the land faster, while field drains have been laid under much of our countryside. England has lost 90% of its wetlands, including almost half a million ponds. Put simply, we have desiccated our landscape.

Such interventions look painfully short-sighted today.

From record-smashing temperatures, wildfires, hosepipe bans and thousands of premature deaths, the climate crisis has left its mark across the summer of 2026.

Tackling the root cause – the burning of fossil fuels – and ending the crisis will take years. So will fixing the UK government’s calamitous failure to protect lives and livelihoods against the long-predicted affects of global heating.

But the climate emergency is right here, right now, and here are 10 policies that Andy Burnham’s government should consider announcing urgently.

A wildlife trust has been restoring the moorlands after recent wild fires across the region.

In the North West, serious fires have burned in Tintwistle, Dovestones, Macclesfield Forest, and Darwen after a summer of extreme heat.

Lancashire Wildlife Trust have been on the moorland at Darwen, planting dwarf shrub plants to make the area more moist and fire resistant.

Scotland’s seabirds are struggling to survive with many species in continued long-term decline, according to new statistics from NatureScot.

The latest Scottish Biodiversity Indicator for Seabirds assessed 19 of the 24 seabird species that breed around our coasts between 1986 and 2024. On average, seabird numbers are now around half of what they were in the 1980s.

Using data from the UK Seabird Monitoring Programme, the study found that almost all seabird species studied have declined over the long term, with eight species significantly affected. Worst hit, Arctic skua has seen a 93 percent decrease in numbers since 1986, followed by little tern (75 percent) and common tern (73 percent).

How do you lose 30 million house sparrows? That is the number that have vanished from Britain’s hedgerows, fields and gardens during my lifetime.

I can recall clouds of sparrows rising up in the fields behind my suburban childhood home on the edge of London. But by the late 1990s they had simply vanished from many of their former haunts.

London was the worst hit: during a survey of Kensington Gardens in 1925, the ornithologist Max Nicholson counted more than 2,600 sparrows, but when he repeated the count at the turn of the millennium he found just eight. Even in the late 1960s, sparrows were so common in the city’s parks that I have a photo of the birds perched on my outstretched hand to feed. Now, you are lucky to see them anywhere in the capital.

The water quality of a Berkshire chalk stream - named by Thames Water as part of a "flagship chalk stream restoration project" - has been classed as "poor" by the Environment Agency.

In the figures released on Thursday, the River Pang also failed a test for hazardous substances.

In 2022, Thames Water began the Pang Flagship Chalk Stream Partnership, which it said would "deliver restoration plans from 2025 to 2035".

A new study could shed light on why red grouse populations in Scotland have declined over recent years, conservationists have said.

Populations of the distinctive upland bird have seen a series of sharp declines over the last 10 years.

There have been several widespread breeding failures and sharp declines across grouse moors managed under a range of different systems.

People have returned to a bird reserve which was closed following an extensive heathland fire lasting almost two weeks.

The blaze which broke out on 29 July tore through Dunwich Heath and also damaged large parts of neighbouring RSPB Minsmere on the Suffolk coast.

Firefighters spent almost two weeks tackling the "unprecedented" inferno, which engulfed an area the size of 210 football pitches (150 hectares or 370 acres), destroying wildlife habitats.

New research from The University of Manchester has found that urban canals can cool their immediate surroundings by more than 2°C during heatwaves.

The study, which is believed to be the first to assess the cooling effects of urban canals at a national-scale, covering the urban canal network of Great Britain and Ireland, found that canals reduce surrounding daytime temperatures by an average of around 0.8°C. During heatwaves, however, the cooling effect increased to between 1.5°C and 2.3°C.

Researchers say the findings highlight the overlooked role that canals could play in climate adaptation as cities become hotter because of climate change.

Almost three-quarters of England is now in drought, as much of Europe braces for its fifth climate crisis-driven heatwave this summer.

Four more regions of England have officially been declared to be in drought: the East Midlands, Lincolnshire and Northamptonshire, Kent and East Sussex, and Solent and the South Downs.

They join seven regions already under drought status since last month: East Anglia, Hertfordshire and London, Thames Valley, Hampshire and the Isle of Wight, Devon and Cornwall, the West Midlands, and Wessex (covering Dorset, Somerset, Wiltshire and south Gloucestershire).

A butterfly thought to have vanished from a Bradford district nature reserve has been spotted for the first time in nearly two decades.

The Wall Brown butterfly, last seen at Raw Nook Nature Reserve in 2009, was discovered by Martyn Priestley, field officer for the Low Moor and Oakenshaw Wildlife Conservation Group.

The rare sighting in Low Moor could indicate a small but hopeful change for the Wall Brown, a butterfly that has suffered long-term decline nationally and is classified as a priority conservation species by the UK government.

Efforts to contain a “devastating” blaze in the New Forest will continue into a second night as firefighting crews race to protect the fragile heathland and rare species.

The area hit by the blaze, which started after a van caught fire on the A31 near Ringwood on Sunday, is protected heathland that is home to a number of rare species, according to the New Forest national park authority.

“Heathland is more rare than rainforest and takes decades to develop – the New Forest has the most extensive area of lowland heath remaining in Europe,” said Gillie Molland, the park authority’s lead ranger.

A tree planting scheme has received £8.7m of government funding to expand the project as organisers celebrate planting more than two million trees.

The Forest for Cornwall scheme started in 2019 in a bid to help the county respond to climate change.

Cornwall Council said the money should help the authority reach its target of 8,000 hectares (19,768 acres) of "new tree canopy by 2035".

Angus Morton crouches behind a cricket pavilion in a London park to snip stinging nettles from an unkempt patch of greenery.

“They’re so abundant and they’re so good,” says Morton, a regenerative gardener who pops out once a week to forage bits for dinner. “I use them in pesto, tea … I’ve even seen someone putting them in croquetas.”

Morton, who posts regularly about his foraging exploits online, is one of a growing number of people venturing into the wild in search of food. He says he shaves hundreds of pounds off his food bill each month, fermenting pine needles to carbonate drinks, picking ivy for soap and harvesting wild mushrooms for dinner.

A National Trust site in Shropshire are working to try and slow down water, to prevent the catchment from getting flooded.

Rangers and volunteers at Attingham Park, in Atcham, have been building dams, restoring ponds and planting trees, in a bid to use their land as a sponge for the River Severn and River Tern.

It is one of eight projects being supported through the Severn Valley Water Management Scheme and Shropshire Council.

A local community pulling together, emergency services saving homes and caravan parks from catastrophe, and farmers and nature reserve wardens working to rapidly create fire breaks to halt a marauding fireball 40 metres high – there was plenty to praise the week after a swathe of east Suffolk burned.

But local people were also in tears at the blackened, ruined state of more than 112 hectares (277 acres) of Dunwich Heath, mourning the devastation of a much-loved nature reserve alongside neighbouring Minsmere. The rare birds that inhabit the reserve have lost crucial habitat, while the rare invertebrate species there will have been “decimated”, according to the reserve staff.

The fire started on Wednesday 29 July; the cause is still unknown, but Suffolk Fire Service said the fire took hold at a “ferocious pace” owing to the hot weather, dry conditions and changing winds. More than 100 firefighters have attended the scene since then, and crews from 18 fire services were in attendance.

Birds eating small plastic pellets spilled into the North Sea could have "devastating consequences", a charity has warned.

Tonnes of the pieces of plastic, known as nurdles, washed up on beaches in north-east England after a crash between two vessels at the Port of Tyne damaged two shipping containers.

The Royal Society for the Protection of Birds (RSPB) said at this time of year, birds were feeding both themselves and their chicks and the pellets could cause choking or starvation as they filled their stomachs.

All of these animals can be found living in the wild in Great Britain (and its surrounding waters), but can you guess which are native and which are not?

Four osprey chicks have fledged in the West Midlands this year, despite "serious challenges" caused by human disturbance, a bird conservation group said.

Two breeding pairs each raised two chicks at a site in Staffordshire, the location of which has not been publicly disclosed to protect the birds.

The birds are amber on the UK list of Birds of Conservation Concern, due to historical persecution and low breeding numbers.

Two whales discovered stranded on a beach have sparked a mystery after experts were left stumped over identifying the exact species.

The creatures were found dead between Mundesley and Trimingham in north Norfolk on Monday.

Initially, the male and female pair were identified as Sowerby's beaked whales. But whale experts have since said they could be a more unusual species not normally found in UK waters.