British conservationists have travelled to a French military base to bring a long-lost singing insect back to the UK.

The Species Recovery Trust (SRT) has collected New Forest Cicada eggs from the Académie militaire de Saint-Cyr Coëtquidan in Brittany and brought them back to Paultons Park Zoo in Hampshire.

The insect was last seen in the New Forest in the 1990s and specialist listening equipment was used to locate the insect in France and its eggs which were hidden inside the stems of bracken.

More than 350 threatened species, including some only found in this country, will benefit from the largest ever investment in recovering England’s wildlife, Natural England announced today (Wednesday 8 July), as part of the government’s “Wild Again: Restoring England’s Wildlife” initiative to turn the tide for England’s wildlife.

The swallowtail butterfly and white-clawed crayfish are just two of the species set to benefit from the £60 million largest ever investment in recovering the country’s threatened plants, animals and fungi, supporting 130 projects across England.

Since 1970, wildlife populations have fallen by a third, with one in six species at risk of extinction in Great Britain including some of our most treasured wildlife. Projects supported through the programme will target 364 threatened species, from birds to beetles, moths to mammals, spiders to snails and sharks to seahorses, to bring us closer to our goal of a wilder, healthier country for generations to come.

Beachgoers are being invited to become citizen scientists to help track how our coastline is changing.

Armed with nothing more than a smartphone, visitors to Tyrella Beach in County Down can now take part in a global project by snapping a photo through a fixed frame and logged via a website.

Each picture becomes part of a growing record that scientists will use to monitor how the beach shifts over time, helping them understand the effects of coastal erosion, rising sea levels and climate change.

Open days will be held to show people how to get involved.

In the silent countryside south of Grantham, three vast steel barns rattled in the breeze. Gathered in a loose circle beside them were 15 landowners, land agents and a couple of young investors; all expensively dressed men, many with a sceptical mien. It was June 2022, and Sir Charles Raymond Burrell, 10th Baronet, was explaining how the purchase of 1,525 bleak acres (617 hectares) of prairie fields of wheat and beans could revolutionise farming and nature conservation, not just in South Lincolnshire but across Britain and beyond.

Burrell, known by everyone as Charlie, led the group on a walk from the barns beside the unlovable modern farmhouse, a red-brick behemoth with small windows like piggy eyes. We began by crossing a field of broad beans. Less than a century ago, it had been a patchwork of 10 fields. As we walked over the hard, cracked ground, we encountered not a single insect. Later, by a verge, a couple of butterflies flew. As for humans, we didn’t meet a single other person in our two-and-a-half-hour stroll across a range of footpaths and field edges. “This is a ruined landscape,” said one of the guests, the architectural historian Matthew Rice. “Not because of the soils. Because there are no people here. I’m sorry there are not enough stoats but I’d like there to be some children here, too.”

What is a farm? Most of us still picture a storybook image from childhood: cows, pigs, wheat, a pond, a farmer, a family. The farm that had, until recently, operated on this site was more typical of today’s “hard-arsed” farming, as Burrell put it. Boothby Lodge Farm had been a business owned by an absentee landlord. No one lived off the land, or on it. Tenants rented the farmhouse and worked elsewhere. More than 92% of the land was ploughed field. A contract farmer simply drove in with big machines several days each year to produce wheat and beans in relatively poor clay soils. Pheasants were released on the 3% of the farm that was woodland. For a few days each winter, men would pay to shoot them.

A rare moth has been spotted at a park in Telford, according to conservationists.

The West Midlands Butterfly and Moth Society said they were "delighted" at the sightings of the six-belted clearwing, which had never been recorded in the town before.

They said the moth was "tiny and easily overlooked" and they hoped it could be found elsewhere in the Telford area.

A marine heatwave could reach "extreme" levels around parts of the UK later this week, according to the Met Office, raising concerns for marine life.

Long periods of sea heat can trigger mass die-offs among some seagrasses, shellfish and other species, as well as encouraging greater numbers of warm-water creatures including octopus.

The heatwave is currently strongest off the coasts of eastern and southern England, and sea temperatures could reach 4-5C above average in places.

A rare beetle known as the “Jewel of York” is at the heart of a new conservation effort.

The iridescent green insect is being protected and reintroduced thanks to conservation work at Flamingo Land Resort in North Yorkshire.

The beetle, often called the Jewel of the Riverbank, now has a new home within a dedicated area at the park, designed to support its long-term survival, as part of wider efforts led by the Yorkshire Derwent Catchment Partnership (YDCP).

The Royal Society for the Protection of Birds (RSPB) Cymru has purchased a 96-hectare upland area of land in the hope of supporting rare Celtic rainforests and woodland birds such as pied flycatchers.

Announced today (July 7), the charity confirmed it had bought the Gallt-y-bere landscape, which is located on the banks of the River Twyi in North Carmarthenshire.

The area forms a “vital missing link” between two separate parts of the RSPB’s Gwenffrwd-Dinas nature reserve in the Elenydd, the organisation said.

The current rate of tree planting in Northern Ireland will have to more than triple by 2032, to get on track for 12% woodland cover by 2050.

The first tree planting action plan for Northern Ireland, external sets out 10 strategic actions over the next five years.

The Environment Minister Andrew Muir said there was "lots to do", including raising awareness of the benefits of tree cover.

With just 8.6% woodland cover, Northern Ireland is one of the least wooded areas in Europe.

A Reform UK councillor's attempt to scrap his authority's climate emergency status has been rejected days after the debate was postponed due to the heat.

Austen Moore urged the Borough Council of King's Lynn & West Norfolk to abandon the climate emergency it declared in 2021 and replace it with a "resilience strategy" focused on flooding, drainage and protecting farmland.

The motion was due to be debated at a full meeting of the Independent Partnership-led council at King's Lynn Town Hall on 25 June, but the building was deemed unfit to host it in the heatwave.

In the last 50 years, Britain has lost an astonishing 73 million wild birds from its landscape, according to the British Trust for Ornithology. Habitat loss, pesticides, disease, cats and the climate crisis mean there are fewer birds than ever before. For children and young people it can be difficult to appreciate the scale of the loss due to a psychological phenomenon called ‘shifting baseline syndrome’, where each generation inherits a degraded version of the environment, and therefore doesn’t notice the overall decline. But Gen Z are bucking the trend. Thanks to social media and the Merlin Bird ID app, birding has become cool. To find out what we’re missing from the dawn chorus, and why young people are embracing birdwatching, Madeleine Finlay hears from the writer Robert Macfarlane and from Jess Painter, a member of the RSPB’s youth council

Through a post-mortem examination of an adult male red squirrel found in Dollar, Clackmannanshire, the University of Edinburgh’s Royal (Dick) School of Veterinary Studies has confirmed that squirrelpox is present in the population. This is only the second time the virus has been detected north of the central belt.

Squirrelpox is a virus carried by grey squirrels which does not affect them but can be rapidly lethal when passed to red squirrels. Symptoms include ulcers, scabs and weeping lesions on the face, paws and genitalia, all of which can prevent reds from eating, drinking or moving. As a result, it is usually fatal within two weeks and if left unmanaged, an outbreak can cause local populations to crash.

The potential outbreak was first alerted to Saving Scotland’s Red Squirrels (SSRS) and the Eastern Lowlands Red Squirrel Group (ELRSG) in June, when a member of the public photographed a sick looking red squirrel in Dollar Glen. Since then, the conservation groups, volunteers, landowners and local residents have been on the lookout, reporting any sick or dead red squirrels they find.

Work to restore saltmarshes on the banks of the Tyne has started.

Marshes will be created along a stretch of Newburn Riverside in Newcastle by the environmental charity Groundwork North East and Cumbria.

The charity said it would improve water quality and biodiversity, as well as help tackle climate change.

Mink numbers in Kent could be cut by 90% within two years under a new project aimed at protecting wildlife.

The Waterlife Recovery Trust (WRT) has received a £20,000 grant from the BASC Wildlife Fund to expand trapping and monitoring across Kent, which once had one of Britain's highest densities of invasive American mink.

Conservationists say mink have a devastating impact on other wildlife, with the water vole, the UK's fastest-declining mammal, their main targets.

The future of Dartmoor National Park’s wild pony population has been under intense scrutiny in recent weeks, with regulators, conservationists, politicians and campaigners all debating the rights and wrongs of a potential pony cull.

The origins of the debate seem to lie in a view expressed by Natural England (NE - the UK government’s environmental advisory body) that Dartmoor is being over-grazed and, as a result, biodiversity is being harmed.

The proposed solution is that landowners should reduce animal stocking densities by around 75% in order for them to be able to continue to qualify for the Environmental Land Management Scheme (ELMS) and its funding.

The endangered swallowtail butterfly Papilio machaon britannicus, which is only regularly found breeding in Britain on the Norfolk Broads, has been a distinct subspecies for at least 200,000 years, according to a study.

Smaller, darker in colour and much rarer than the continental swallowtail, britannicus was previously considered to have developed its distinctive form during its confinement in the wetlands of eastern England over the last 8,000 years, after the flooding of Doggerland.

But the new genetic study suggests britannicus is a wetland specialist and may have once occurred much more widely in north European wetlands, separating from its continental cousins between 200,000 and 1.7m years ago.

Firefighters and conservation groups in Surrey are calling for countryside visitors to take steps to prevent wildfires.

Surrey Fire & Rescue Service and the Surrey Nature Partnership warned green spaces including the county's "internationally significant heathlands" were at risk of fire.

The public can reduce the risk by avoiding barbecues in heathland, disposing of cigarettes safely, and binning or taking home litter, according to authorities.

Many people visiting in the beach in Cornwall will already be aware of the venomous fish with an "excruciating" sting that is hiding in the shallows - and this is what it looks like.

Weever fish are small fish with venomous spines that bury themselves half in the sand, and when you step on them, their poison creates an extremely painful sting.

As the sea warms, more and more of these fish are being found in the UK shallows, an expert has now warned.

Wildlife gardening with young people can have boundless benefits for us all, says Norfolk Wildlife Trust conservation officer Robert Morgan.

Although it was many years ago, I clearly remember my first pond – a Belfast sink in my parents' back garden.

This humble basin was full of aquatic life – smooth newts, common frogs, and all kinds of invertebrates.

Imagine a deafening abundance of birdsong so loud it wakes your children at dawn; the chirrup of house sparrows, the chattering of starlings, the melody of the wren, and the clear high-pitched flute of blackbirds saturating the garden, reverberating around your local park, dominating your neighbourhood from early morning to evening twilight.

So loud is the song of the thrush that the naturalist and ornithologist WH Hudson wrote in 1919 that he was grateful when observing one that it was perched on a tree at a distance from his home, “so that when I woke at half past three or four o’clock, the shrill indefatigable voice came in at the open window, softened by distance and washed by the dewy atmosphere to greater purity”.

Poet Percy Shelley wrote of the skylark’s shrill delight, while John Keats’s Ode to a Nightingale was inspired when he heard the full voice of the bird in his garden. In 1832, the poet John Clare attempted to put the nightingale’s song into words for the first time.

Release of 80 white-clawed crayfish into protected Devon Wildlife Trust reserve establishes a new secure population for Britain's only native freshwater crayfish.

Leading British wildlife conservation charity Wildwood Trust has released 70 endangered white-clawed crayfish (Austropotamobius pallipes) into a protected Devon Wildlife Trust nature reserve, creating a secure population of Britain's only native freshwater crayfish as part of urgent efforts to prevent the species' extinction in the South West.

The release is part of Wildwood Trust's Saving Devon's Native Crayfish project, delivered in partnership with Devon Wildlife Trust and supported by The National Lottery Heritage Fund. It follows more than a year of habitat assessments and preparation work, including surveys to assess the suitability of the stream, monitoring to confirm the absence of invasive American signal crayfish (Pacifastacus leniusculus), and biosecurity checks to ensure the site could support a thriving new population.

An avocet spotted at an RSPB nature reserve in the West Midlands has been confirmed as the oldest of its kind ever recorded in Britain.

The distinctive black and white wading bird, identified at RSPB Middleton Lakes in Staffordshire, is now 36 years old - more than five times the species' average lifespan of about seven years.

The birds were once rare to the point of extinction in the UK, being lost as a breeding bird during the 1840s, with the RSPB being integral to its recovery.

The UK government breached environmental law on several occasions when granting farmers permission to use a bee-killing pesticide, a watchdog has found.

In 2023 and 2024, the Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs (Defra) in the then Conservative government granted emergency authorisation to allow farmers to use a banned neonicotinoid pesticide on sugar beet crops.

The pesticide, Cruiser SB, contains the active ingredient thiamethoxam. One teaspoon of this is enough to kill 1.25bn honeybees, according to Prof Dave Goulson, a bee expert at the University of Sussex.

Dr Peter Jones has spent the past 30 years immersed - quite literally - in bogs, fens and wetlands, trying to help save the planet and earning himself the nickname The Bogfather in the process.

These landscapes are now at the forefront of the climate crisis and Jones has been making an offer that policymakers are finding hard to refuse, a nature-based solution that tackles climate change, flooding, wildfires and biodiversity loss all at the same time.

Peatlands store 30% of Wales' land-based carbon, despite covering only 4% of the surface, but they are about 90% degraded, meaning they leak greenhouse gases instead of storing them.

A yellow eel spotted for the second time in Coventry is "rare and exciting", says an expert, who is appealing for help from the public to track further local sightings.

Alexander Jones, ecology and biodiversity officer at Coventry City Council, saw one in the River Sherbourne in 2024 but was shocked to see a second this year, since the fish used to be one of the most common species locally, but is now one of the rarest.

The second sighting in the river suggests it is making a slow comeback, Jones said.