GreyShuck

The combination of sunny spring weather and habitat improved by a herd of red Devon cattle has led to a surge in numbers of one of the UK’s rarest butterflies on moorland in the English west country.

As well as increasing in established pockets on Exmoor, the heath fritillary is spreading to new areas, which experts say is highly unusual.

More than 1,000 heath fritillary butterflies, nicknamed the woodman’s follower, have been seen at sites on the National Trust’s Holnicote Estate on Exmoor and nearby land, a significant rise from about 600 at the same time last year.

A moth species long thought to be extinct in England has made a dramatic return, rediscovered at local conservation charity Kent Wildlife Trust’s Lydden Temple Ewell Reserve near Dover after a 73-year absence.

Periclepsis cinctana, once known as the ‘Dover Tortrix’ and more recently renamed the ‘Tiree Twist’, was last recorded in England in 1952. Believed to survive only on the remote Scottish island of Tiree, its rediscovery has stunned the UK conservation community.

The breakthrough came when Rebecca Levey, an ecologist with Butterfly Conservation, was surveying the site with volunteers searching for Straw Belle caterpillars. Spotting the small chalky-white moth with distinctive orangey-brown markings, she immediately recognised its significance and contacted Dave Shenton, Kent Wildlife Trust’s Local Wildlife Sites Officer and Kent County Moth Recorder.

This Insect Week (June 23rd to 29th), The Wildlife Trusts and Royal Horticultural Society are asking gardeners to look out for hornet look-a-likes, as part of their ‘Be a hoverfly hero’ campaign.

According to insect experts at the two organisations, nature can be canny: what you think is a hornet may be a hoverfly disguised as its more fearsome fellow pollinator – both do important jobs in your garden.

These creatures are deploying a cunning art – Batesian mimicry – named after explorer Henry Walter Bates. Whilst exploring Amazon rainforests, he noted that many species had evolved to look scarier than they actually were, to avoid being eaten by predators.

Woodland where 12 football fields worth of trees was illegally felled by its owner is to become a nature reserve after an organisation which helped in a long-running court case bought the land.

Jeff Lane caused a "devastating loss" to the environment by the illegal felling of 2,000 trees in 2019 on more than eight hectares (20 acres) on Gower, Swansea.

At the time, Natural Resources Wales (NRW) called it the worst case of illegal tree felling it had seen in 30 years.

The organisers of an initiative aimed at reversing a decline in numbers of house martins are asking members of the public to report the locations of nests.

The distinctive dark blue and white birds, which migrate from Africa each spring, are on the UK's Red List of endangered bird species.

The Hampshire House Martins Project will use the data gathered to help with conservation efforts, including providing artificial nest cups.

Northern Ireland’s first Climate Action Plan. Some positives, but it’s late, has limited ambition and refuses to take on the biggest polluters in Big Agri-Food.

There are some good things in the Climate Action Plan, but you must work hard to find them in this 280-page consultation. The Climate Action Plan should have been laid before the Assembly by the end of 2023.

Five beaver kits have been born in Cairngorms National Park for the second year in a row – after a 400-year hiatus.

The kits have been captured on camera at two separate sites in the park, in the Scottish Highlands, and hopes are high more may be born on other sites.

Beavers were first released into the park less than two years ago in a bid to establish a “healthy, sustainable” population.

I haven’t found an hour when I don’t love a bog. Recently, after a night of counting rare caterpillars in Borth in Mid Wales (they come out only after dark), walking back to the car under the glow of a flower moon, I wondered if 2am was my new favourite. I felt very safe, held by the bog’s softness, and everyone that was out at that hour seemed to have a sense of humour. I met a nightjar hopping around on the ground, pretending, I think, to be a frog.

But there is also something about the humidity of a languid afternoon on a bog, when everything slows and fat bumbles hum, that is surprisingly good. I have done freezing horizontal rain and thick, cold-to-your-bones fog and wind so howling that I couldn’t think. All of those were hard, but I did come away feeling truly alive.

I have travelled to the tip of Scotland and far beyond to visit bogs. In all the hours, days and weeks I have spent on them, I have learned that time behaves differently. It stretches out like the bog landscape, seeming to still the world beyond. There is something very special about that.

Osprey chicks have hatched in the East of England for the first time in more than 250 years, according to a wildlife trust.

The fish-eating birds of prey arrived at Ranworth Broad nature reserve near Wroxham in April and the first sighting of their chicks was on Friday.

The Norfolk Wildlife Trust described it as a "significant moment for wildlife conservation" in the county.

Senior visitor centre manager Teala Leeder said: "Getting my first glimpse of the chicks and confirming our greatest hope was just incredible."

The recent ecological collapse of the River Wye due to pollution from intensive agriculture has been well documented. But the slow-motion repetition of this ecocide on the neighbouring River Severn has largely unfolded out of sight.

For years, local authorities have been waving through industrial-scale livestock production units across the catchment of this iconic river. These toxic megafarms produce vast quantities of animal waste, which is spread on local land with minimal consideration for the cumulative environmental destruction it can cause.

This week, the high court called time on this practice. In a landmark ruling, the court quashed Shropshire council’s planning permission for a 230,000-bird intensive poultry unit near two protected wetland sites and a mile from the banks of the Severn. The court found the council had unlawfully failed to assess the cumulative impact of adding yet another waste-spewing chicken megafarm to an already bloated cluster of intensive poultry units (IPUs).

A Scots river has been found to have the second highest concentration of a toxic chemical thought to harm human fertility ever found in the world.

Joint research by York University and environmental charity Fidra has raised the alarm on levels of TFA (trifluoroacetic acid) in ­Glasgow’s River Kelvin.

The “forever chemical” takes more than 1000 years to break down in the environment and German government scientists recently pushed for the EU to classify it as toxic to ­reproduction amid growing fears.

Limits on the amount of greenhouse gases Scotland will emit over the coming decades have been announced as part of action to tackle climate change.

The Carbon Budgets propose five-year, statutory limits on emissions from 2026 to 2045. The proposed budgets are in line with the advice from the independent Climate Change Committee (CCC) and the Scottish Government’s own assessments.