UK Nature and Environment

Elevated levels of harmful bacteria have been found at Wales’ first official river bathing site, warn public health officials.

Wild swimmers have been advised to stay out of the River Wye at The Warren, a pebble beach near Hay-on-Wye after high levels of E.coli and intestinal enterococci bacteria were found.

The site was granted official bathing status last month, compelling Welsh environment watchdog Natural Resources Wales (NRW) to monitor water quality at the site.

Two beaver kits and their mother have been spotted on camera for the first time at Longleat.

The beavers arrived on the estate in 2021 and have since established three breeding territories, said conservation and research manager, Dr Tom Lewis.

New footage shows them building dams, lodges and satellite lodges across the estate, boosting biodiversity.

A green initiative called 'Vertical Meadows' in the UK is transforming the space below outdoor advertisements. This aims to counter biodiversity loss and help bring nature’s buzz back to urban areas.

A volunteer marine animal medic has been tracking a humpback whale off the East Yorkshire Coast.

Beth Clyne, 25, who lives in Kilnsea, first saw the whale near Withernsea on 15 July.

It has since moved up to Easington and was last spotted in Kilnsea, Ms Clyne said.

Yorkshire Wildlife Trust said it was "rare" for a humpback to be spotted "this close inshore and for consecutive days".

Shocking photos show the destruction caused by illegal off-road bikes that have torn fields on Marsden Moor to shreds.

The beauty spot is being wrecked by scrambler bikes that have been spotted racing on the moorland over recent weekends.

A new police taskforce has been set up to crack down on illegal motorbike riding in the area that is putting wildlife, including protected birds, at risk, according to rangers from the National Trust.

Beachgoers in Devon were left in shock as "thousands" of jellyfish were found washed up on the shores of Torbay. Saira Franklin managed to capture the astonishing sight on camera at Broadsands Beach earlier this week.

The footage shows a carpet of small, translucent jellyfish believed to number in the thousands, stretching across the bay as onlookers marvelled at the spectacle, DevonLive reports.

According to Saira, the creatures are likely moon jellyfish, which are the most common type found in UK waters, as per The Wildlife Trust. These jellyfish typically range from 5 to 40cm in diameter and are recognisable by the four circles visible through their transparent bell.

The warbling call of the curlew has returned to Trasna Island in Lower Lough Erne.

Conservationists are celebrating the first successful breeding birds on the island in living memory.

RSPB (NI) manages several islands in Lough Erne and has its nature reserve on the Lower Lough.

It acquired Trasna Island in 2017 and since then has worked with the Lough Erne Landscape Partnership to restore habitat to support the return of vulnerable species including the curlew, along with the lapwing, snipe and redshank.

The Northern Ireland Executive approved an action plan for the future of Lough Neagh at a meeting on Thursday.

Minister of Agriculture, Environment and Rural Affairs Andrew Muir said he was "glad the executive was able to agree" the report and action plan.

The lough has been affected by blue-green algal blooms in recent months.

Twenty of the plan’s 37 actions have already been given the go-ahead as they fell to the Department of Agriculture, Environment and Rural Affairs (DAERA).

But the remaining 17 actions were cross-cutting and required executive consent.

For the team behind the Wilder Blean bison release at Kent Wildlife Trust and Wildwood Trust it seems like only yesterday when, in front of the world’s media, the founding herd members made their first tentative steps into the woodland. It was a historic day, not just in conservation but in climate, as the UK experienced temperatures past 40 degrees for the first time since records began – a stark reminder of the challenges faced by climate change.

In the two years that followed the release of three original herd members, they increased in number to six, with a surprise calf, a bull arriving from Germany and a not-so-unexpected birth of a male calf in the winter. The woodland now has a New Forest feel to it, with free-roaming Exmoor ponies, longhorn cattle, and Iron-Age pigs, all bringing their unique browsing behaviours to the reserve, shaping the landscape naturally, boosting biodiversity, and helping to build climate resilience.

In the face of the current nature and biodiversity emergencies, and the risk of extinction faced by some species across Wales, stories of conservation success can offer us hope for the future.

One such uplifting example involves the remarkable return of two of the UK’s rarest and most elusive marshland birds - bitterns and marsh harriers – to the Gwent Levels near Newport.

After previously being driven to the point of extinction, bitterns have successfully bred for the fifth successive year in a row at Newport Wetlands, thanks to dedicated conservation efforts by officers and volunteers from Natural Resources Wales (NRW).

A mass stranding last week that led to the deaths of 77 pilot whales on the Orkney island of Sanday was the largest ever recorded of the species on British shores. Initially, 12 of the animals at Tresness beach were still alive – but sadly did not survive.

The event occurred almost exactly a year after the stranding of 55 pilot whales on Tolsta beach on the Isle of Lewis in the Hebrides on 16 July 2023. All but one of those whales died. According to Dr Andrew Brownlow, director of the Scottish Marine Animal Stranding Scheme (SMASS) at Glasgow University, this may not be a coincidence.

“The Orkney stranding last week has so many parallels with what happened a year ago, in terms of number of animals involved and their behaviour,” he says.

With their long, spoon-shaped beaks, it is perhaps little surprise that the RSPB has nicknamed the offspring of a spoonbill a “teaspoon”.

It has been a bumper year for the snow-white wading birds, which have been found nesting and breeding in Cambridgeshire for the first time since the 17th century.

Once quite common in the UK, spoonbills were occasionally seen on their migratory journey, but no longer bred here because they were hunted for their meat and the wetland habitats in which they use their long beaks to fish for prey had been destroyed.

A pioneering project led by Hafren Dyfrdwy and RSPB Cymru to restore peatlands at Lake Vyrnwy has won a prestigious national award.

The scheme has been ongoing since 2018 and focuses on rejuvenating Lake Vyrnwy's blanket bog into fully functional ecosystems.

Blanket bogs are a type of peatland found in only a handful of places around the globe with cool, wet climates.

The hard work of the two organisations was recognised, with the project clinching the victory in the Large-scale Practical Nature Conservation Project category at the CIEEM Awards 2024.

A critically endangered North Atlantic right whale has been spotted off the coast of Ireland for the first time in more than a century.

Holidaymaker Adrian Maguire, from County Tyrone in Northern Ireland, glimpsed the large, dark body of the whale on the surface of the water while out fishing for mackerel.

“I just looked in amazement at the size of it,” said Maguire. “I’ve never experienced that in my life.” He described how he let his boat drift while he, his wife and two friends watched the whale for about an hour in McSwynes bay, County Donegal, off the north-west coast of Ireland.

Leading environmental groups have today launched a new campaign calling on the Scottish government to bring forward legislation to protect nature.

The campaign, Scotland Loves Nature, is backed by 43 organisations, including RSPB Scotland, the Scottish Wildlife Trust, and WWF Scotland.

The coalition are demanding the Scottish government introduce a Natural Environment Bill to bring in legal targets to restore nature. These targets would commit the Scottish government to preventing the extinction of wildlife and halting the decline of nature by 2030, and to make significant progress in restoring Scotland’s natural environment by 2045.

The RBCT, considered the largest field experiment of its kind in history, was established to test whether killing badgers would result in a reduction of bovine TB in cattle, and followed many years of badger persecution in the name of disease control without evidence to justify it. The trial compared the incidents of cattle TB in areas where badgers were killed, with those where they weren’t. In total, some 11,000 badgers were shot during the trial.

The report on the results of the RBCT, published in 2006, claimed that the proactive killing of enough badgers over a wide enough area could significantly reduce incidents of cattle TB, albeit the authors of the report advised against such a policy on the grounds that it would not be cost-effective. In spite of this, the incoming coalition government announced in 2010 that licenced badger culling would be introduced in England.

The most recent study, led by eminent veterinary epidemiologist Professor Paul Torgerson at the University of Zurich, re-analysed the data from the RBCT, and concluded that, when using more suitable statistical methods, and accounting for all cattle herds in which bovine TB was detected during the trial, there was no evidence to support an effect of badger culling.

Ministers will introduce a crackdown on water companies through the introduction of a new Water Bill, in a major victory for i’s Save Britain’s Rivers campaign.

The Water (Special Measures) Bill will bring in tougher fines and sanctions for water companies responsible for sewage spills, the King confirmed today, as he set out the Government’s legislative plans for the next year.

It will include “severe and automatic” fines for polluting water companies and powers to pursue personal criminal liability charges against executives.

Two North London rivers are to be given “a new lease of life” under a new restoration scheme beginning this month, an environmental charity has said.

Works on the rivers in Harrow and Barnet are part of the wider Action for Silk Stream project, a £150million six-year initiative to reduce the risk of flooding in the Silk Stream catchment and wider River Brent.

Thames 21, the charity supporting the project funded by Defra and led by both Barnet Council and Harrow Council, has announced the latest scheme focuses on the Burnt Oak Brook and Edgware Brook rivers.

Highlands estate has been banned from holding a general licence for game bird shooting - after two protected red kites were illegally killed on its land.

NatureScot has restricted the use of general licences on Lochindorb Estate, near Grantown-on-Spey, for three years. The decision was made on the basis of evidence provided by Police Scotland of wildlife crime against birds.

This evidence included a red kite found poisoned with an insecticide in 2021 near to a lapwing bait on land managed at the time by the estate, and a red kite shot on Lochindorb estate in 2023.

The scheme has helped to boost tree planting across the district, using funding from HM Treasury's Shared Outcomes Fund to test different ways of increasing tree cover in rural and urban areas. The latest round saw 25,000 trees planted in 22 projects on 15 different sites between December 2023 and March 2024 and included the scheme's latest initiative, a targeted planting scheme.

The targeted tree scheme enabled landowners to access funding to help plant trees, hedgerows, small-wooded areas (copses) and orchards in specific areas of the district where tree-planting could help increase links between habitats and help our environment adapt to the changing climate.

Projects have included the introduction of hedgerows, which play an important role in providing wildlife corridors for a number of different species, as well as the planting of community orchards in public spaces, where people can come together to plant collections of fruit trees and access local produce.

Isabella Tree, award-winning conservationist and bestselling author, will be conferred an Honorary Doctor of Science at the University of Sussex’s Summer Graduation 2024.

A large skein of greylag geese swoops and glides onto the enormous lake behind Knepp Castle.

“In the past, we would have seen them as bad news,” says Isabella Tree, who lives with her husband, Charlie Burrell, here at his ancestral home. “It would have meant they were eating our crops.”

Now the geese are welcomed to their 3,500-acre estate in West Sussex, along with an abundance of other native creatures and plants.

For the past 24 years, Isabella and Charlie have gradually turned what was a failing farm into a natural haven for wildlife.

HERTS and Middlesex Wildlife Trust has launched a fund-raising campaign to protect the future of some wildlife species, which it says are at crisis point.

It cites the number of brown hares, thought to have declined by more than 80% in the past 100 years, turtle doves, whose numbers have plummeted by 99% since the 1960s, common toads and some flowering plant species.

The trust is the leading voice for conservation in the counties, with more than 23,500 members and 1,100 active volunteers. This year marks the charity’s 60th anniversary.

Believe it or not, there was once a rainforest covering a fifth of Britain (this country does, after all, get ridiculous amounts of wet weather). But we don’t mean the tropical kind you find in Australia or South America — we’re talking about temperate rainforests.

Temperate rainforests are super rare and only occur in places close to the sea with high rainfall, high humidity and low variations in temperature.

In 2024 only small pockets of the UK’s rainforest, known at the Atlantic or Celtic rainforest, remain. But campaigners have been trying to change that and the Wildlife Trust of South and West Wales has just announced its plans recover and revive its section of the woodland.

Wildlife gardening is a bloomin' great way to help nature near you thrive. That's why we launched this wildlife gardening competition for the second year running! We want to see your blossoming balconies, small urban nature havens, sprawling back gardens, community patches, nature-friendly allotments, school outdoor spaces and everything in between.

This is all part of Team Wilder, a growing movement of people who notice and celebrate nature in their day-to-day lives, taking super-local actions to tackle the ecological and environmental crisis as a collective.

A 100-metre-wide algal bloom left an area of Windermere unfit for bathing, tests have revealed, as campaigners blamed United Utilities for continually dumping sewage.

Matt Staniek, director of the Save Windermere campaign, said the group were alerted to an “extensive” area of blue-green algae at Waterhead, Ambleside on 25 June. The bacteria can be poisonous to both humans and animals.

Although it is not among the Government’s designated bathing sites, Waterhead is popular for water activities and people were swimming at the time, campaigners said.