A grey seal colony has established itself at a former Cold War weapons testing site on the Suffolk coast.

More than 130 grey seal pups have been born at Orford Ness, a remote shingle spit, this breeding season.

Rangers said the blubbery mammals have used the ex-military site as a breeding ground every year since 2021, following a reduction in visitor access because of the pandemic.

It is thought they spilled over from well-populated colonies in Norfolk.

Become a bee spotter for the Royal Horticultural Society by recording bumblebees on flowers in UK parks and gardens this spring (project open 12 Feb 2024 to 31 May 2024).

Flowers in spring are important but which flowers do bumblebees use? To help find the answer, the RHS are inviting gardeners across the UK to become community scientists and help spot bumblebees on flowers this spring.

England is launching a biodiversity credit scheme this week that attempts to force all new road and housebuilding projects to benefit nature, rather than damage it.

The “nature market”, called biodiversity net gain (BNG), means all new building projects must achieve a 10% net gain in biodiversity or habitat. If a woodland is destroyed by a road, for example, another needs to be recreated. This can happen either on site or elsewhere.

The requirement becomes law under the Town and Country Planning Act on 12 February for larger sites, and on 2 April 2024 for smaller sites.

DOZENS of Scotland’s marine and coastal species are critically endangered or in rapid decline due to industrial fishing, climate change, pollution and other pressures, The Ferret has found.

The species most at risk include fish, birds and mammals such as cod, salmon, trout, harbour seal, gulls, shag and guillemot.

Declining fish numbers in Scottish waters – caused by overfishing and climate change – are impacting birds, dolphins, whales and other animals that rely on fish as a key food source, while pollution, energy infrastructure and fishing gear also threaten marine life.

“The number was unbelievable,” said James Richardson, of the first times he heard there were hundreds of thousands of raw sewage spills a year in England and Wales.

He was astounded to find the figures were true. “I thought crikey, this is crazy,” said the IT worker, who was spurred to build Top of the Poops, a data-packed website adorned with a poop emoji.

Elevated by a network of outraged citizens such as Richardson, and boosted by the launch of The Times’s Clean it Up campaign one year ago, tackling water pollution is expected to be a big environmental issue when election campaigning ramps up.

Original link

Tens of thousands of Christmas trees are buried on a beach near Blackpool.

Some stick out of the sand in plain sight, others are buried underneath metres of sand dunes - exactly where they're supposed to be.

Every February for two days, hundreds of locals descend on the beach wielding spades. They spend hours digging trenches in the sand and then fill them with old Christmas trees, buried up to their bottom branches. The next time the wind blows, the trees will catch grains of sand in their branches and begin to rebuild Lancashire's last remaining dunes.

It takes six months to a year to build new dunes with this method, a process that can take hundreds of years in nature. The annual Christmas tree burial has completely changed the landscape along the beach - what was once flat is now hilly, covered in grasses and home to around 500 sand lizards.

...

Development, coastal erosion and people using the sand in industry have all forced the dunes into retreat. Fylde Council now bears the responsibility of having Lancashire's only remaining sand dunes, and ranger Andy Singleton Mills looks after them. He says the sand dunes are crucial for Fylde.

"They're a brilliant soft sea defence, they protect all the houses of St Annes and Lytham further down the coast. And they're also a rich cultural feature - they've been here for hundreds of years and they protect so much wildlife."

We reveal walking routes near you that are ideal for scenery, wildlife and peace and quiet.

52 walks rated.

Graham Usher urges Church of England to look into this ‘often very ancient land’, as it prepares to vote on increasing biodiversity

Churchyards should be rewilded to increase biodiversity and to make them “places of the living, not just the dead”, a Church of England bishop has said.

Local parishes are responsible for about 7,100 hectares (17,500 acres) of churchyards in England. The C of E also owns about 34,000 hectares of farmland, mostly let to tenant farmers, and 9,300 hectares of forestry.

The total number of forests in the UK makes up an estimated 3.25 million hectares. They’re vital habitats for plants and wildlife, help sequester carbon and give us the air we breathe. A walk in the woods also benefits our mental and physical health. It invites us to slow down, revel in their beauty and find a greater appreciation for nature.

What Kind Of Forests Are There In The Uk?

Broadleaved woodland is common throughout the UK comprising trees that don’t have needles (e.g. conifers). Common trees are beech, ash, oak and birch.

In Scotland, tiny pockets of native Caledonian pine which once made up a vast forest still exist around lochs and glens.

New native woods have been planted to restore habitats while ancient woodland from around the 1600s or earlier only covers 2.5% of the UK.

Some of the rarest types of woodland are temperate rainforests. Referred to as the Atlantic or Celtic rainforest, it’s thought to be even more threatened than tropical rainforests.

A beach clean is taking place across Cornwall for its seventh year.

The Love Your Beach weekend, organised by Cornwall Wildlife Trust, aims to encourage volunteers to clean rubbish from beaches across the county.

Organisers said it hoped the event would "enable people to feel empowered to make a difference to their local nature".

British wildlife is being failed by the legal system, as people who commit crimes against birds of prey face a less than 4% prosecution rate, a conservation charity has warned.

The Royal Society for the Protection of Birds (RSPB) has warned birds of prey and other British wildlife face routine shooting, trapping or poisoning - putting their populations at risk.

The latest data from the RSPB has found 54 confirmed crimes involving birds of prey in 2022, but just two people were prosecuted.

Wildcats could return to South West England for the first time in more than a century, thanks to a new study by the Devon Wildlife Trust.

The European wildcat, known as the woodcat in England, was once found throughout the UK but was hunted to near-extinction by the 18th century.

They can still be found in remote areas of Scotland, which has led them to be known as the 'Scottish wildcat', although a small population lived on Exmoor until the 1900s.

A national study recently found that the South West was among the best areas in England and Wales for their reintroduction.

DEFRA is seeking views on Natural England’s proposals to change the fees levied under the Wildlife Licence Charges (England) Order 2018.

The changes are required because Natural England needs to:

• enable full cost recovery in line with HM Treasury principles on Managing Public Money;
• introduce charges for new streamlined licensing routes, such as Bat Earned Recognition; and
• ensure funding for licensing service improvements such as digitisation.

There are no proposals to change exemptions to charges.

Share your recent wildlife encounters - large or small.

I haven't had anything really spectacular for a while, but I live in a fairly tucked away spot in East Anglia and the last stretch to reach home is along a farm track with an open field alongside. When I drive home along this in the evenings - with headlights on - one of the brown hares that spend time in the field will run in towards the lights and then curve to run parallel with my car maybe 20m away. I don't know why they do this, but I have found the same behaviour in the past too. I used to live and work on a coastal nature reserve. The drive on or off involved a couple of miles along an open shingle track and hares would frequently do exactly the same there if I crossed it in the evenings with headlights on. They would run in from the surrounding vegetated shingle. It seemed as though they were enjoying the 'race' - staying parallel with the Landrover for some hundreds of meters at a time before peeling off again.

One or two of the hares will visit our garden too later in the year - but they haven't over the winter.

National Nestbox Week is an established part of the ornithological calendar. Celebrated from February 14th each year, it puts the spotlight on breeding birds and asks everyone to put up more nestboxes in their local area.

Some 15 wildlife organisations are meeting in Norfolk to discuss ways of protecting the Eurasian curlew in an event described as the "first of its kind".

Curlew Action is hosting the gathering in King's Lynn and it will include a visit to the RSPB's Snettisham reserve on The Wash, which is a haven for wading birds.

Mary Colwell, founder of Curlew Action, said: "I want people to be aware that one of the iconic birds of the British countryside is declining so rapidly.

Image of basking shark in sea

Basking shark © Alexander Mustard/2020VISION

The Irish Sea Network, which includes Cumbria Wildlife Trust, is urging planners in all six nations bordering the Irish Sea to collaborate and cooperate, for the sake of nature.

In a report out today, the Network calls for planners to work together strategically and ensure that wildlife is protected, as they review how the Irish Sea is used.

The Irish Sea, which is bordered by England, Wales, Scotland, Ireland, Northern Ireland and the Isle of Man, is coming under significant and increasing pressure from damaging activities such as industrial fishing, aquaculture, offshore renewable energy development, shipping, military activity, recreational activity and pollution. All of these activities take their toll on marine species, that are already endangered by the impacts of climate change.

A mammoth project to restore the Peak District’s “globally significant” landscape is well underway, and we headed to Hade Edge to see the progress being made by Moors for the Future.

Moors for the Future (MFTF) is a not-for-profit partnership working since 2003 to revive the Peak District and part of the Pennine moorland, which became the most degraded upland landscape in Europe due to 200 years of heavy pollution resulting from the industrial revolution, among other factors.

Built like a torpedo, weighing more than a male polar bear when fully grown and fetching prices in Japan of more than £2m for a single fish, the bluefin tuna was once an abundant apex predator in British waters. In the 1960s, these warm-blooded aquatic hunters disappeared – pushed to the brink of extinction in the eastern Atlantic by overfishing.

But since 2014, the enormous migratory fish have returned in their thousands off the coast of south-west England after deep cuts to fishing quotas in the eastern Atlantic to revive the species. Nobody is really sure why they are back in such great numbers – with populations also recovering in the Mediterranean, where the vast majority are caught – but bluefin tuna is no longer listed as an endangered species in the UK, and is now often spotted hunting close to shore by wildlife photographers. With its return, minds have also turned to how to catch it without causing it to vanish from British waters again.

Peatlands are our largest terrestrial carbon store, however, as a result of centuries of drainage for agriculture, just 1% of England’s lowland peatlands remain in a near-natural state, and these drained peatlands account for 88% of all greenhouse gas emissions from England’s peat.

The projects will use government funding to improve the management of water on lowland peat and enhance understanding of climate change impacts and flood risk.

Wildlife and Countryside Link, a charity umbrella group whose members include the RSPCA, WWF and National Trust, made the claim in evidence provided to Parliament on racism and its influence on the natural world.

MPs in an all-party parliamentary group (APPG) were informed that the British countryside has been influenced by “racist colonial legacies” which have created an environment some fear is “dominated by white people”.

The country’s green spaces are governed by “white British cultural values”, the report argues, and the perception that the countryside is a “white space” prevents people from other ethnic backgrounds from enjoying the outdoors.

Original link

Most councils risk failing to deliver a boost for nature linked to new housing developments in their areas, conservationists have warned, as new rules come in.

From next week, planning rules that require developers to create new habitats as part of building projects to deliver an overall 10% boost to nature – known as “biodiversity net gain” – come into force in England.

The rules will see developers required to take steps such as creating new woodland and restoring natural wetland areas, where possible within the project itself.

During the long, solitary days of lockdown, I found solace in raising houseplants. Suddenly stuck at home, I had more time to perfect the watering routine of a fussy Swiss cheese plant, and lovingly train our devil’s ivy to delicately frame the bookcases.

But I started noticing that these plants, sourced online, often arrived in the post with a passport. Most had travelled from all over Europe, with one common tagline: contains peat.

As a peatland scientist, these labels instantly filled me with horror. Hidden Peat, a new campaign launched by The Wildlife Trusts, is now highlighting the presence of peat in all sorts of consumer products, including house plants.

A new project from Trees for Life and Woodland Trust Scotland aims to discover Scotland’s ‘lost’ native pinewoods – home to wild Scots pines with an ancestry that can be traced back to the end of the last ice age – so they can be saved and restored before it’s too late.

Caledonian pinewoods are globally unique and support rare wildlife including red squirrels, capercaillie and crossbills. Yet less than 2% of the Caledonian forest, which once covered much of the Highlands, survives. Just 84 individual Caledonian pinewoods are now officially recognised, having been last documented more than a quarter of a century ago.

But Woodland Trust Scotland and Trees for Life have become aware of other lost wild pinewoods, and from historical documents and anecdotal reports, more are thought to exist.

The charities have teamed up to identify and save these forgotten pinewoods through the Wild Pine Project, beginning with the western Highlands, where Scots pines form part of Scotland’s rare temperate rainforest.

My TL;DR:

The Environment Agency and the UK government have failed to protect the River Wye from catastrophic decline by allowing pollution from industrial chicken farming to saturate the land and devastate the protected river, a legal challenge is to argue.

Farming rules for water state it is an offence for farmers to apply to the land fertilisers or organic manures at a level that exceeds what the land can naturally absorb. But a loophole in the law states farmers must abide by these rules unless it is impractical to do so.

A judicial review brought by the group River Action is being heard in the high court in Cardiff. River Action says this loophole in the law is allowing poultry waste from 25 million chickens intensively farmed in the catchment to poison the Wye.

River Action said in court documents submitted to the judicial review that it was not disputed that the Wye, one of the most celebrated rivers in the UK, was in ecological crisis.

“In recent years [the River Wye] has been blighted by algal blooms that suck the oxygen out of the water[.] The algal blooms are agreed to be caused by excess nutrients, nitrogen and especially phosphorus … It is not disputed that by far the largest single contributor to that nutrient overload is agricultural runoff.”

Charles Watson, the founder of River Action, said the loophole meant the river was almost dead as "huge quantities of manure have been allowed to be dumped in the Wye".