UK Nature and Environment

Scotland's moorlands are deliberately burned from October to mid-April in a practice known as "muirburn", which encourages new grass and heather that feeds grouse and livestock. This arrangement suits landowners who shoot these game birds and farmers who graze sheep, but it poses a problem when it happens on peatland.

A healthy peatland is a soggy and spongy terrain made up of partially decomposed plant matter known as peat. Peat soils lock away vast amounts of carbon. In fact, peatlands globally store twice as much carbon as the world's forests. Peat soils damaged by fire release this carbon, warming the climate. Fire damage can also mean the peat retains less water, and so rain washes more quickly into rivers which increases flooding downstream.

Testing by citizen scientists of a beck that feeds into Lake Windermere has revealed a huge loss in invertebrate life that campaigners say is being caused by sewage discharges.

Save Windermere and WildFish carried out testing for invertebrates in Cunsey Beck, a site of special scientific interest (SSSI), in order to assess the impact on its freshwater ecology of the Near Sawrey wastewater treatment works, owned and operated by United Utilities.

Their first year results showed a decline of 76% in riverfly species and a 33% reduction in riverfly diversity in samples taken below the sewage outlet compared with samples taken above it.

They said the permit issued by the Environment Agency – outlining when raw sewage can be discharged legally from the treatment works and providing limits for toxic pollutants – is not fit for purpose.

The importance of moth caterpillars for common garden birds has been revealed in a new study. Researchers have found that years when moth numbers were up resulted in increased population growth for the blue tit.

The results, derived from 23 years worth of bird and insect population data, are published today in Ecology Letters.

Dr. Luke Evans, of the University of Reading, led the research. He said, "Insect abundance directly impacts songbird numbers from year to year. When moth caterpillars are large in number, blue tit parents can easily find food for their demanding chicks. When moth numbers crash it gets much harder for birds to find enough insects and raise as many young."

Dr. Malcom Burgess, of the Royal Society for the Protection of Birds (RSPB), who co-led the research, added, "It's important we understand the relationships between insects and birds to plan effective conservation measures given evidence of recent insect declines. Our study highlights the need to better manage habitats to support insects, as they are a vital food source sustaining many common garden birds such as the blue tit."

Over the last couple of days I've heard a bird song I'm sure I've not heard before. Starts off melodious, like a thrush, then goes into a few staccato notes. Some kind of finch, I'm thinking.

The Pesticide Collaboration calls for the UK Government to end the cycle of permitting the ‘emergency’ use of banned pesticide thiamethoxam.

The government is once again ignoring the advice of its own experts. This year the UK Expert Committee on Pesticides (ECP) advised against allowing thiamethoxam – a highly bee-toxic neonicotinoid – to be used due to the potential adverse effects on honeybees and other pollinators which outweigh any likely benefits.

But today, the government has authorised its use for another year, despite calls from civil society, including from The Wildlife Trusts, to break this cycle of yearly authorisations.

The National Trust is marking 125 years since it acquired its first nature reserve - a rare wetlands habitat.

Wicken Fen has been "a mecca for local naturalists" because it is one of Cambridgeshire's last pieces of undrained fen, the charity said.

The first two acres (0.8ha) of land were bought in 1899. The reserve now extends across 2,053 acres (830ha).

Countryside manager Alan Kell said Wicken Fen was now the most species-rich area of the UK.

Big Garden Birdwatch is the world’s largest garden wildlife survey. Every year, hundreds of thousands of nature lovers like you take part, helping to build a picture of how garden birds are faring.

Vital legal protections for the environment and human health are being destroyed in post-Brexit departures from European legislation, a detailed analysis by the Guardian reveals.

The UK is falling behind the EU on almost every area of environmental regulation, as the bloc strengthens its legislation while the UK weakens it. In some cases, ministers are removing EU-derived environmental protections from the statute book entirely.

Businesses and environmental groups have told the Guardian they have been left in the dark as to the extent of the regressions because there is no government body tracking the divergence between the EU and the UK.

William Gibson wrote "...she walked back...through that weird, evanescent moment that belongs to every sunny morning..., when some strange perpetual promise of chlorophyll and hidden, warming fruit graces the air, just before the hydrocarbon blanket settles in." I stepped outside this morning a couple of hours too late for that, and my lungs immediately sensed the heavy, choking quality of the air.

But checking on aqicn.org and DEFRA websites, I see they say air-quality here is good / air pollution level low.

Both of us cannot be wrong.

#AirQuality

The government is failing on almost all of its environmental targets, risking an “irreversible spiral of decline” in nature, a damning report by the environment watchdog has found.

Dame Glenys Stacey, chair of the Office for Environmental Protection (OEP), has said in the report, published today, that if action is not taken England will fail to meet its goal of halting nature’s decline by 2030, as well as a host of other vital nature targets.

Squatting in the strandline as a storm brewed on the horizon, I combed through the debris with tweezers. I spotted my first nurdle almost immediately. Covered in sand, the pale plastic pellet blended almost perfectly into the background. Next to me, a woman scraped the top layer of sand away and plopped it in a bucket of seawater. As she stirred, several nurdles drifted to the surface.

“It’s impossible to make a dent,” I thought. Despite removing more than 3,000 pieces of microplastic during our cleanup, thousands more winked at us from the sand as we left Camber Sands beach. These tiny pre-production plastic pellets, called nurdles, are littering UK beaches in such numbers that beach cleanups can’t keep up.

“I think removing all the nurdles would be an impossible task. They’re everywhere,” says Andy Dinsdale, the founder of the East Sussex-based environmental organisation Strandliners.

This June, we successfully released 38 healthy captive-bred hazel dormouse into a woodland on the Calke Abbey estate in Derbyshire. We reintroduced this new population of dormice in collaboration with Wildwood Trust, London Zoo ZSL and Paignton Zoo.

At our final box check of the season, we found that the newly released dormice in Calke Abbey have fully settled into their new home. Our volunteers recorded five dormice, three of the dormice originally reintroduced, and two juveniles, which shows that they continue to breed. Good news!

The UK's deer population is at its highest level for 1,000 years, and is growing exponentially. Now at roughly 2 million animals, the UK’s deer stalkers need to cull at least 750,000 animals a year just for the population to stand still. There are also more food banks in the UK than ever. As the need for food grows, donations, especially those containing protein, become harder to find.

To combat these two problems, the Wild Venison Project has created a supply chain from deer stalkers all over the country to food banks that need protein-rich donations. The Guardian environment correspondent Damien Gayle follows the process from forest to food bank, to see if venison could provide an answer to Britain’s food shortage.

Henry Jephson was wandering around the countryside near Bristol during a Covid lockdown when his eye was caught by the ghostly appearance of a lion’s mane mushroom, its shaggy fronds hanging across a tree trunk.

Jephson, the head of research at the Bristol Fungarium, knew he was looking at something rare and special. A staple of traditional Chinese medicine, the lion’s mane is also native to the UK, but is under threat. The “absolutely enormous” specimen spotted by Jephson was the first to be seen in south-west England in eight years.

Little did he know then that the fungus would change the focus of Jephson’s work. He is now working with Natural England and the Royal Horticultural Society (RHS) to get native mushrooms back into England’s woodlands. He helps run a mushroom farm, which has pivoted from growing oyster and shiitake mushrooms for restaurants, to conserving native fungi and creating health supplements from them.

My TL;DR:

The Sea Ranger Service, which launched last week in the UK, trains young people from predominately deprived coastal regions to become ocean conservationists, while paying them a salary.

The Sea Ranger Service was founded in the Netherlands in 2016 and is also operational in France. In both countries, it receives money to service government contracts for ocean conservation.

The aim is to train 20,000 people for maritime careers by 2040.

Young Britons aged 18-29 are being invited to apply to take part in the UK programme. But be warned, it’s no picnic. Applicants must go through a rigorous bootcamp to prove they’ve got what it takes to work in challenging circumstances.

Successful applicants will take to the water on sailing expeditions from Port Talbot, Wales, where the ship is based, and will be employed as full-time sea rangers.

A wildlife group is aiming to eradicate invasive American mink from all of Britain after ridding them from part of England during a three-year trial. This involved a new approach that used the scents of mink’s anal glands as bait to lure them into smart traps, marking the first time the animal has been eradicated from a large area anywhere in the world.

“Until about a month ago, I thought mink had not been eradicated from anywhere,” says Tony Martin, chair of the Waterlife Recovery Trust, which organised the trial alongside volunteers. “Then I found a report of a little island off Estonia where they had got rid of them, but nothing on anything like this scale. This is the orders of magnitude bigger.”

Mink are small semiaquatic predators that are related to weasels and are often farmed for their fur. As a result of them escaping from farms or being released by animal activists over the past century, American mink (Neogale vison), which are native to North America, have spread to many parts of Europe and South America.

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<yoink!> - I'm grabbing this quote from an article @GreyShuck posted: “There is a real need for us to inspire people to connect with nature and to make biodiversity a central part of their lives – particularly in urban areas and less affluent communities” Well I did just that the other day, in a l-o-n-g wait for a bus to turn up. There was a small raptor perching on the streetlights, avidly hunting just before sunset. One time he came over into the trees and dived off them into the undergrowth, but didn't seem to catch anything. It was blunt-tailed, probably a sparrowhawk or a kestrel. This was right on the edge of the urban and less affluent community I live in, around a multi-laned highway. [Re the quote - why in "less affluent areas"?] 🪶

Ancient trees are as much a part of our heritage as stately homes, cathedrals and works of art. But they don’t get the same protection.

Identifying where ancient trees are takes us one step closer to giving them the care and protection they need. That’s where you come in.

Your records of these oldest and most characterful trees help us to identify ancient tree hot spots, monitor current threats and future losses, plan how best to conserve them in the future and much more.

Some of Scotland’s most famous bird species, including grouse and kestrels, are among those declining as a result of climate change, a new report has found.

The study, by public body NatureScot, charted the populations of Scotland’s terrestrial breeding birds between 1994 and 2022. It found significant changes to the numbers and species of birds living in the country’s urban, woodland, upland and farmland habitats, in large part due to ­hotter and wetter weather related to the climate crisis.

The Environment Agency faces new allegations of neglect of the River Wye after a project by a conservation group found effluent and contaminated waters at free-range egg farms flowing directly into watercourses in the catchment.

Out of 47 sites visited in England and Wales in the Wye catchment, 19 had drains running from the poultry units to a nearby watercourse. Many of the farms had drains excavated within a few metres of the sheds.

Bats fly back to their roosts after a night of hunting in a “leapfrogging” pattern that allows them to maximise their time out and stay safe from predators, researchers have found.

A team from Cardiff University and the University of Sussex developed a mathematical model using “trajectory data” that tracked the flight of greater horseshoe bats in Devon to pinpoint how the creatures engage with the nocturnal environment.

They found that when they leave their roosts, typically caves or loft spaces, the bats initially spread out in a radius of about a mile for the first hour and a half to two hours, before beginning to gradually make their way home.

The furthest bat out never appeared to want to be at the periphery and so leapfrogged past the closest bat on the way back towards the roost, researchers observed.

Walkers wanting to enjoy footpaths across the British countryside are being blocked or obstructed in nearly 32,000 places across England and Wales.

But they are fighting back, with one rambler even training as a lawyer to force councils to keep the way clear.

A BBC investigation found councils which have responsibility for footpaths had 4,000 more access issues on public rights of way in 2023 than in 2022.

Campaigners said this showed a "growing abuse and neglect" of the path network.

Local authorities said "funding constraints" limited what they can do.

As floods hit the UK and the rest of the world with growing frequency, “natural flood management” (NFM) is increasingly becoming part of the response. Much of the research in this area is in its relative infancy, and a lot of it is UK-based – partly because of the impact floods have on such a densely populated and heavily built-up country.

The Nature Friendly Farming Network – set up as a way for agricultural businesses to share knowledge about nature-friendly farming and holistic climate strategies – has been a central locus for this work, and farmers are joining in increasing numbers. The NFFN also helps farmers sign up to the various UK government environmental farming schemes, so they can receive grants for their work.

I have just made myself very popular with a local social housing company: I've brought to their attention, for the second time in about the last ten years, the miserable condition of a tiny strip of land at the end of one of their roads. It's no more than 3m by 2, and has a grassy bank and small trees, all planted by Nature. In spring the bank has primroses all over it, except that's not been so obvious since people started using it as a rubbish tip. It used to be OK, and so pretty. I've come to realise there's some obscure psychological reason for people going out of their way to screw up bits of natural terrain, so what can the housing company do? I've asked them why they don't just check the surroundings of their properties every so often and give them a quick clean-up. 🌸 😢

Wildlife is under even more pressure than ever as basic rules which protect hedgerows and stop farmers from causing excessive river pollution ended on 31st December 2023. The National Trust, RSPB and The Wildlife Trusts are calling for immediate action to fill the gaps left by these vital protections.

Basic regulations known as ‘cross compliance’ had to be followed by farmers in order to receive rural payments between 2005 and 2023. The rules included not farming the land right up to the edge of rivers to ensure farm pollution and soil was not washed into the water – as well as protecting hedgerows and maintaining green cover on soils.

Following the UK’s exit from the European Union, the UK Government announced these rules would cease to exist after 31st December 2023 and be replaced by new UK ones. The Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs (Defra) has not confirmed if protections for nature will be maintained – and the absence of rules means that farmers are free to cut hedges in the spring and summer which risks harming nesting birds. It could also mean that more farm pollution and soil is washed into rivers which are already under huge pressure from excessive nutrients caused by manure, soil and other pollutants.