GreyShuck

A major new 100-page report provides the most detailed analysis yet of what a lynx reintroduction project in Scotland would need to do to ensure lynx and people could coexist.

It outlines conclusions and recommendations agreed by a nine-month national discussion involving a diverse, cross-sector range of 53 stakeholders including farmer and landowner organisations, gamekeepers, foresters, tourism operators and conservationists.

The National Lynx Discussion, held between May and November last year and organised by the Lynx to Scotland partnership, was independently facilitated by an expert from the International Union for the Conservation of Nature (IUCN) Conservation Planning Specialist Group.

The nest of the only breeding pair of ospreys on England's south coast has a second new arrival.

The chick emerged from its egg shortly before 19:00 BST on Thursday. The first hatched earlier the same day shortly before 06:00.

The ospreys, female CJ7 and male 022, laid a clutch of four eggs in their nest near Poole Harbour in Dorset for the second year in a row in April.

Providing every new home with at least one “swift brick” to help endangered cavity-nesting birds has been rejected by Labour at the committee stage of its increasingly controversial planning bill.

The amendment to the bill to ask every developer to provide a £35 hollow brick for swifts, house martins, sparrows and starlings, which was tabled by Labour MP Barry Gardiner, has been rejected by the Labour-dominated committee.

Despite the Labour party having supported the swift brick amendment when it was tabled on Conservative government legislation in 2023, housing minister, Matthew Pennycook, told the House of Commons committee: “We are not convinced that legislating to mandate the use of specific wildlife features is the right approach, whether that is done through building regulations or a freestanding legal requirement.”

Labour backbenchers are pressing the government to revive a right to roam policy in England after a supreme court ruling enshrined the right to wild camp on Dartmoor.

The court ruled this week that camping on the national park was legal after a multimillionaire hedge fund manager tried to remove the right to camp on his Devon estate, and by extension from the rest of the park.

There is a legal right to roam over only 8% of England, with the rest subject to landowner permission. Dartmoor is the only place in the country where there is a right to wild camp. Scotland has had a right to roam since 2003.

t is a tactic worthy of Tom Cruise’s Ethan Hunt: wait until a beeping pedestrian crossing indicates a traffic queue has formed then use the line of cars as cover to reach your target. But this isn’t a scene from Mission: Impossible – it’s the behaviour of a young hawk.

The discovery is not the first time birds have been found to make use of an urban environment. Crows, for example, are known to drop foods such as walnuts on to roads for cars to crush them open.

However, the researcher behind a new study says it is the most advanced case so far of raptors making use of traffic patterns.

Osprey watchers are being treated to a rarely seen - and possibly never before captured on film – polygamy saga playing out at a nest in the Tweed Valley.

Forestry and land Scotland (FLS) cameras are capturing in real time the fascinating behaviour of two female ospreys and one male who have set up a home as a trio – a form of polygamy known as polygyny with a male breeding with multiple females.

The cameras set up as part of The Tweed Valley Osprey Project are providing a fascinating insight into the natural behaviour between the adult birds – Mrs O, a female who has previously nested at the site and a new female and young male – as the partnership and nesting behaviour develops during the season.

Leading wildlife charities are calling on Labour to scrap a significant section of the planning bill that they say is a “licence to kill nature”, as new data reveals bats and newts are not the main reason planning is delayed in England.

The RSPB and the Wildlife Trusts, whose membership is more than 2 million, said Labour had broken its promises on nature. They called for part three of the bill, which allows developers to avoid environmental laws at a site by paying into a national nature recovery fund to pay for environmental improvements elsewhere, to be ditched.

Beccy Speight, CEO of the RSPB, said: “It’s now clear that the bill in its current form will rip the heart out of environmental protections and risks sending nature further into freefall.

The sea off the coast of the UK and Ireland is experiencing an unprecedented marine heatwave with temperatures increasing by as much as 4C above average for the spring in some areas.

Marine biologists say the intensity and unprecedented nature of the rise in water temperatures off the coasts of Devon, Cornwall and the west coast of Ireland are very concerning. As human-induced climate breakdown continues to raise global temperatures, the frequency of marine heatwaves is increasing.

“This is unprecedented because it is happening so early in the year,” said Dr Manuela Truebano, from the school of biological and marine sciences at the University of Plymouth. “To see these temperature rises around UK waters at this time of year is quite sobering. Each time it happens we use the word ‘unprecedented’, and I am very concerned at the increase in prevalence and intensity of these marine heatwave events.”

Mussels are one of nature’s yardsticks for coastal water quality, and they even help filter it. But with mussel numbers declining from Western Europe to the Arctic due to climate change, Environment Agency scientists are exploring new ways to sample water.

Each spring, Environment Agency officers collect samples of Atlantic Blue Mussels (Mytilus edulis) from the Camel estuary in Cornwall as part of their routine water quality monitoring. The Camel is one of around twenty sites in a national network.

The mussel flesh is removed from the mussels and then sent to the Environment Agency laboratories at Starcross and Leeds where it is analysed for a range of chemical contaminants found in the shellfish.

A Senedd Committee says that it is ‘gravely concerned’ at Natural Resources Wales’ (NRW) plan to reduce the number of low category pollution incidents it responds to.

The Climate Change, Environment and Infrastructure Committee’s annual scrutiny of the environmental watchdog highlights several concerning aspects of how it plans to keep an eye on things like fly-tipping, illegal chemical dumping and water pollution.

NRW’s new plan is to focus on larger incidents and to adopt a “higher tolerance of risk” in how they manage reports of pollution in Wales.

You would be fooled for thinking it is a frosty winter's morning or a Halloween scene, but a once-in-a-year phenomenon that puts a covering of white across trees, bushes and hedgerows is actually down to thousands of caterpillars.

The white webbing has been seen across the East of England this May, and is created on host plants by the larvae who protect themselves from predators before they turn into moths or butterflies.

East Anglian-based entomologist, Dr Ian Bedford, said: "Inside that net blanket is thousands and thousands of little caterpillars all munching on the leaves.

Wild camping will be allowed on Dartmoor after the supreme court ruled that a multimillionaire landowner was wrong to ban it on his land.

Dartmoor was – until the legal action – the only place in England where wild camping without the permission of the landowner was enshrined in law. In Scotland, people have enjoyed this right since 2003.

For two years, Alexander Darwall, a multimillionaire hedge fund manager, has been pursuing the matter through the courts against the Dartmoor National Park Authority (DNPA), as he does not want people camping on his land without his permission.