The NewForest was among nine precious landscapes in Britain to receive £21 million in Heritage Lottery Fund money. The Hampshire bational park will receive an HLF grant of £2.9m, including £161,000 of development funding. Read more about it here in the NBN Trust Newsletter.
CGO Ecology has been busy lately. A recent highlight was visiting the Caribbean islands of Trinidad & Tobago, where we were honoured to be guests of sea turtle conservation charity SOS Tobago - Save Our Sea Turtles Tobago. Program Manager Giancarlo Lalsingh took us to see their excellent monitoring and guardian work first-hand, all achieved on limited means. We saw five giant nesting female leatherbacks that night - a moving experience, and an impressive spectacle.
The European Food Safety Authority (EFSA) has announced that neonicotinoid pesticides are dangerous to honey bees, and should not be used on crops that are attractive to them. The Parliament UK website quoted the Chair of the Environmental Audit Committee, Joan Walley MP, as saying:
Read more: EU announcement on pesticide threat to honey bees
Ireland's National Biodiversity Data Centre has announced a new red list of Irish maflies, produced in conjunction with the National Parks and Wildlife Service, Northern Ireland Environment Agency. It assessed threats to all 33 species of Irish mayflies. Six are categorised as under threat of extinction, and two are near threatened.
According to a press release by Scottish Natural Heritage (SNH), around 146 beavers are now established in about 40 family groups in the Tayside region of Scotland. They originated from accidental escapes or deliberate releases around 2006.
This year has been a bumper year for sand lizard conservation. The Amphibian and Reptile Conservation Trust (ARC) has managed to introduce/reintroduce sand lizards to seven sites in England and Wales - possibly a record number.
Read more: Bumper Year for the Sand Lizard Recovery Programme
Work by Russia researcher Andrey Reshetnikov has shown that an invasive fish - the rotan, Perccottus glenii - can severely affect European amphibian populations. Rotan effectively deplete amphibian larvae in their breeding ponds, except for the noxious common toad (Bufo bufo).
Britain's rarest reptile, the smooth snake, is only found in a handful of southern English counties. Heathland loss during the 20th century has seen them disappear from whole counties such as Devon. However, a project coordinated by Amphibian and Reptile Conservation (ARC) has been reintroducing smooth snakes to a heathland nature reserve in Devon.
Read more: Early success for Devon smooth snake reintroduction
The national furore over the planned badger cull is gaining momentum, and there are serious concerns on all sides that peaceful protest and objection might spill over into violent confrontation. While all this is happening, another cull is quietly going ahead: that of 100 wild boar in the Forest of Dean.
Britain's only venomous snake, the adder (Vipera berus), has often been in the news over the last year or so. Fears over its apparent decline have raised media attention across the UK, but rarely does a lowly reptile precipitate such fuss as a parliamentary question and a note in Hansard!