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WHY MOTHS MATTER LEARNING TO LOVE OUR UNSUNG INSECT HEROES

LOOK OUT! Keeping watch with a meerkat mob

WHY EVOLUTION NEEDS EXTINCTION

THE BIRD THAT LOST ITS SONG The mystery of Australia’s regent honeyeater

STAYCATION SU M M E R

What does iKt m e a n fo r U w i l d l i fe ?

July 2021 | Vol. 39 No. 08

ON THE GOSHAWK TRAIL

Discover Guyana Reconnect with the natural world

© FotoNatura

© Jamie Lafferty

© Andrea DeCairies

© Jamie Lafferty

For more information visit

www.guyanatourism.com #DiscoverGuyana

Staying out for the summer ’ve always loved the British summer – rockpools and sand dunes, or a walk in the woods, with the shade of the trees providing welcome respite from the baking sun.

I love being bathed in every shade of green, everything in full bloom, insects going about their business. Shieldbugs are a current favourite in our house, and my son and I enjoy popping one into his bug catcher to see if we can identify it.

But in this enforced ‘staycation summer’, many people who work for wildlife are bracing themselves for an influx of tourists getting too close, causing damage and

Cover: Meerkat by Suzi Eszterhas; goshawk: Pete Cairns/naturepl.com(captive); moth: David Chapman/Alamy; This page: Alex Mustard/2020VISION/naturepl.com

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disturbance to the very thing they’ve come to see in the first place. Nature reserves aren’t parks, yet they’re so often used as places for recreation.

It’s a difficult balance to get right.

Fortunately, if we’ve become expert at anything this last 16 months or so, it’s keeping our distance. As Andrew Griffiths explains in his feature on how to watch wildlife well (p66), the further back we keep, the better all round.

So let’s all stay home, stay back, and enjoy a really wild summer!

Paul McGuinness Editor

A respectful dive is given the seal of approval (p66).

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July 2021

BBC Wildlife

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Meerkats: Suz Eszterhas; regent honeyeater: Doug G mesy; sea s: Ern e Janes/naturep .com; goshawk: David Chapman/Alamy; moth: Getty; illustration by Peter David Scott/The Art Agency

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The people behind our stories

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July 2021

CONTENTS 66 Staycation summer

WILD MONTH 12

Learn how to make sure you don’t disturb wildlife while holidaying near home this season

Summer wonders Seven species to see in July

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72 On the goshawk trail

Upland hay meadows

COVER STORY

Follow a raptor monitor as she delves deep into the forests of Shropshire

Mike Dilger heads into the hills in search of wildflowers and wagtails

23 Nick Baker’s hidden Britain

OUR WILD WORLD

The shining guest ant

24 News A new aquarium opens at ZSL London Zoo, showcasing the world’s corals

90 At home Natural history TV, books and more

28 Truth or fiction?

94 Your photos

Is there no way to escape the sting of an Asian hornet?

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COVER STORY

SUZI ESZTERHAS The award-winning wildlife photographer gives us an insight into the life of meerkats. “A beautiful thing about meerkat society is that all adults babysit and feed the pups – all except Mum, who leaves them to it,” she says. See p48

96 Feedback

Mark Carwardine

Your letters and Tales from the Bush

The conservationist questions the UK’s latest ‘polluting megaprojects’

99 Puzzles

32 Meet the scientist

JAMES LOWEN Naturalist and moth-lover James shines a light on the plight of this underappreciated insect. “From the general public’s perspective, downturns in moth fortunes might actually be celebrated rather than lamented,” he says. See p58

REGULARS

Kristal Ambrose on tackling plastic pollution in the Bahamas through grassroots youth activism

6

In focus Water snake, butterfly and baboons

FEATURES

80 Behind the image Snoozing sperm whales

38 The bird that lost its song

COVER STORY

Discover the strange tale of the regent honeyeater, which has become so rare that it has forgotten its own call

82 Q&A Do genitals have other uses?

106 Ella Al-Shamahi

44 Evolution needs extinction

The palaeoanthropologist shares her fascination with chimpanzee behaviour

ANDREW GRIFFITHS When it comes to wildlife tourism, there is “a very real danger that we might destroy the very thing we have come to see,” says the nature writer.

He investigates how we can make ‘staycationing’ sustainable. See p66

From the dodo to the woolly mammoth, extinction gets a bad rep – but it is as creative as it is destructive COVER STORY

48 Photo story: Meerkats

COVER STORY

Take a peek at this family album, which reveals why it takes a mob of meerkats to raise a litter of unruly pups

58 Why moths matter

COVER STORY

Find out the current state of moths across Britain – and what we can all do to help them in our gardens

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ELLA AL SHAMAHI “Humans see ourselves as distinct from the animal kingdom,” says the palaeoanthropologist and TV presenter. “Chimpanzees are very, very loudly demonstrating that we’re not that different at all.” See p106 BBC Wildlife

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Sergio Mestre López

IN FOCUS | Fish-eye view Nightmarish to those with a fear of snakes, dreamlike to others, this surreal, topsy-turvy shot was taken from the bottom of a stream in the Sierra de Gredos mountain region in Spain. Surprised by the sight of the underwater photographer, the viperine water snake swam upwards towards the refuge of waterside vegetation. Despite its name, they are actually nonvenomous, but so-called because of their viper-like appearance. No risk to the human bather then, but if you are a fish or frog, best to watch out!

Oliver Wright/naturepl.com

IN FOCUS | Close encounter Sprinkled with droplets of dew, you’d be forgiven for being unable to identify this shaggy creature. It’s actually a meadow brown butterfly – the head, to be precise. This one was pictured in Ledston, Yorkshire, but this species is a common sight across Britain and Ireland and studies suggest that it exhibits regional variations in the spotted patterns on its wings. Intensive farming has caused a decline in numbers of the meadow brown, but if you’re lucky you might still witness large squadrons of them fluttering low over vegetation – even on the dullest of British summer days.

Anup Shah/naturepl.com

IN FOCUS | Shore thing The shores of Lake Tanganyika in Gombe National Park, Tanzania, is a wonderful place to see olive baboons in their natural habitat – sitting in troops grooming each other or beachcombing. Primatologist Jane Goodall famously studied chimpanzees in the area, and the olive baboons here have themselves been the focus of research since the 1960s. Named due to the greenish tone to their fur, this species – one of the Old World monkeys – can be found in 25 countries across sub-Saharan Central Africa.

WILDMONTH With verdant hedgerows, the hum of insects, warmer days and milder nights, summer is in full swing.

By Ben Hoare

1 | BATS

Andy Harmer/Alamy

Count our blessings As long as there have been churches, bats have used them for their maternity colonies. The big, complex roof spaces could almost have been designed with bats in mind, thanks to their numerous exits and countless dark corners, perfect for nursing mothers and their babies to hide in.

About 6,000 of Britain’s old churches were once estimated to contain bat roosts, but a new survey being carried out by Bats in Churches aims to produce a more up-to-date figure. By involving local congregations, the study will hopefully also lead to more positive PR for bats, often maligned for the mess their droppings make.

We joke about ‘bats in the belfry’, yet in reality church towers are draughty and noisy. In summer,

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maternity colonies are more likely to be found in warm, southerly parts of the church roof. At least nine of the UK’s 17 breeding bat species have been recorded in churches, sometimes in mixed-species roosts, but all containing adult females (males roost elsewhere).

Common and soprano pipistrelles are the most frequent lodgers, along with Natterer’s bats, brown longeared bats (pictured) and serotines.

However, during a trial run of the survey, an extremely rare grey longeared bat was found in a Devon church, so there could be some surprises in store.

GET INVOLVED To help the Bats in Churches survey, visit batsinchurches.org

THE LIFE SCIENTIFIC Professor Kate Jones on bats.

WILD NEWS

New Government legislation will see the trading of ivory banned.

Below: mountain hares will also be protected.

LEGISLATION

Animal sentience recognised in UK law Ban on hunting trophy imports and review of wildlife crime part of raft of Government measures.

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shark’s fin is removed and its body is discarded – something that has been outlawed in the UK for almost 20 years.

However, a legal loophole that has continued to allow people to carry up to 20kg of dried shark fins in and out of the UK will now be closed. The plan also includes proposals to look at wild animal welfare in the English uplands.

A series of policy reviews will be launched into wildlife crime and the use of snares, plus England’s only population of mountain hares, which can be found in the Peak District, will now be fully protected.

“It’s fantastic news that animal sentience has finally been recognised by the Government and this will help legally protect animals when new laws, policies or trade deals take place,” said Vanessa Amoroso from World Animal Protection.

“A trade deal, though, with Australia or

any country with welfare standards that don’t meet those of the UK goes against the Action Plan for Animal Welfare and is where the new Sentience Bill risks falling short,” she added.

And while welcoming the new proposals, Joshua Kaile, head of programmes and policy at the International Fund for Animal Welfare, believes that a lot can be done to protect wild animals now that does not require new legislation.

“We’d like to see the government guarantee the long-term funding of the National Wildlife Crime Unit and increase the numbers of dedicated wildlife crime police officers across the country,” he said. Simon Birch

FIND OUT MORE The new government plans: bit.ly/ActionPlanAnimalWelfare

July 2021

Ivory: Carl de Souza/AFP/Getty; hare: Darren Dawson/500px/Getty

nimal welfare campaigners have warmly welcomed Government plans to recognise all animals as sentient beings. The pioneering move acknowledges, for the first time in the UK, that animals have the capacity to experience feelings such as pleasure and pain, and the government will now enshrine in law that animals are aware of what is happening to them.

The move to recognise animals as sentient beings is the flagship proposal in a suite of wide-ranging animal conservation and welfare aims set out in the Government’s Action Plan for Animal Welfare.

Among the new measures is a ban on the import of hunting trophies from endangered animals overseas and also on the trade of elephant ivory.

There is a move, too, on the controversial practice of shark finning, whereby a

WILD JULY 2 | MEADOWSWEET

Sweet treat Meadowsweet: Laurie Campbell; wasp: Brian Valentine; lizard: Ross Hoddinott/naturepl.com

In boggy places such as streamsides, ditches and damp verges, you may catch the mouth-watering aroma of marzipan this month. The scent is from meadowsweet, a classic wildflower of high summer that does its best to remind us of the good times. It’s a tall plant, with beautiful cream sprays of frothy flowers, and is usually buzzing with a variety of hoverflies and other insects. Intriguingly, not only were the flowers once used to flavour mead, but they were also harvested as a hangover cure.

GET INVOLVED Download monthly wildflower spotter sheets: plantlife.org.uk/uk/discover-wildplants-nature/spotter-sheets

3 | ICHNEUMON WASP

Caterpillar hunter Many people find these narrowwaisted, parasitic wasps rather grisly, but ichneumons are both beautiful and numerous. There are dozens of British species, mostly found in flowery habitats where there is plenty of bare or sandy earth for the female wasps to bury their paralysed victims.

Simon Barnes comments in his book Ten Million Aliens: “The ichneumon model is no one-off example of super-evil: it’s a raging success.” Amblyteles armatorius is

ONLINE

one of the most common species, frequently seen in gardens, and it catches moth caterpillars for its larvae. The female lays her eggs in the caterpillars and when they hatch they feed on their hosts, eventually killing them before pupating. The adult ichneumons, though, feed from flowers.

FIND OUT MORE Natural History Museum guide to ichneumons: bit.ly/NHMichneumons

CROWDSCIENCE Can I save the insects?

How to help…

WILD JULY 4 | COMMON LIZARD

Live birth If you see a lizard in Britain, it’s likely to be this species. The four others found here (two native, two introduced) are rare, very local in distribution, shy – or all three. In fact, on the island of Ireland, there is no other reptile. Female common lizards are currently laden with eggs, having mated in spring. They spend long

July 2021

periods basking on rocks, fences or open ground to warm their swollen bellies. The eggs hatch internally, and the brood of half-a-dozen little black lizards is ‘born’ this month or next.

FIND OUT MORE Read about British reptiles: arc-trust.org

BBC Wildlife

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WILD JULY ONLINE

LIFE WITH…

6 | FLAT PERIWINKLE

Roy Dennis on his life studying ospreys.

Seaweed muncher Periwinkles are a group of small and very pretty sea snails, whose shells litter many British and Irish coasts. Some beaches consist almost entirely of these and other shells.

In life, the flat periwinkle is best looked for among the brown seaweed on which it grazes. You might spot it moving slowly with its tentacles out, as it rasps the salty fronds. Its shell is smooth, glossy and (as its name suggests) rather flat. Being bright yellow or orange, it tends to stand out, though there is also a wellcamouflaged green form.

FIND OUT MORE Guide to rockpooling: discoverwildlife. com/rockpool-wildlife 5 | OSPREY

Flight school Despite setbacks due to illegal persecution, the ‘fish hawk’ or osprey is one of the great success stories of British conservation. This magnificent raptor has continued its comeback, helped by natural colonisation and the targeted release of birds, most recently at Poole Harbour in Dorset.

By July, many osprey chicks have fledged, but they stay near

the nest well into August, honing their flying skills and accepting fish from their parents. This is an exciting time to visit one of the publicly accessible viewing areas.

If you can’t travel, watch one of the popular osprey cams online.

FIND OUT MORE Osprey conservation: roydennis.org/ animals/raptors/osprey

7 | BLACK GARDEN ANT

Flying ant days Osprey: Brian Matthews; snail: Laurie Campbell; ants: Ruurd Jelle van der Leij/Buiten-beeld/Minden

Hot and sticky weather in July and August sees one of the great wildlife spectacles, as millions of black ants pour from their nests and take to the skies. These are sexually mature winged adults, known as alates – mostly males, but with a few larger virgin queens among them.

Often the first sign that such a swarming event is underway is the swooping gulls, starlings, house martins and swifts, taking advantage of the abundant but short-lived feast. These swarms can often occur simultaneously across quite a wide area.

FIND OUT MORE All about UK invertebrates: buglife.org.uk 16

BBC Wildlife

July 2021

ADVERTISEMENT FEATURE

PLANTING FOR POLLINATORS

It isn’t only British wildlife that needs looking after. That’s why Jordans Cereals is helping the bees in California’s almond groves too ALMONDS ARE RENOWNED for their wonderfully sweet crunch, but what isn’t so sweet is that these flavourful nuts are often grown as a monoculture, which can be bad news for bees. Because monocultures comprise of a single crop being grown in the same soil (which can also lead to soil erosion), pollinators can struggle to access the diverse range of plants they need to stay healthy.

Just as trees are vital for filtering our air, bees are essential for pollinating the food we need to survive, as well as the trees and flowers that provide habitats for wildlife. So, to help serve the needs of bees and increase sustainability, Jordans Cereals has teamed up with Project Apis m. on its Seeds for Bees® project.

In the same way the Jordans Farm Partnership makes space on British oat farms for biodiversity, Seeds for Bees® introduces biodiversity into Californian almond groves, creating

a ‘bee buffet’ that promotes soil health and helps pollinators thrive. Using cover crops and seed mixes that are specially formulated to bloom before the almonds blossom, they’re able to provide a source of forage for honeybees when natural forage may be scarce.

BUSY FOR THE BEES The Seeds for Bees® support doesn’t end after the almond trees bloom, either.

Instead, the project provides nutrition and habitat for native pollinators and other insects, including the western monarch butterfly, throughout the year.

Why not take inspiration from Project Apis m. and Jordans and apply these planting-for-pollinators tips in your own outdoor space? Whether it’s growing more herbs or creating a small wildflower meadow, there are so many simple things you can do – and the bees will love you for it!

HERBS AND MEDICINAL PLANTS As well as being a good source of nutrition for humans, these kinds of plants are also great for pollinators.

Coriander, mint, lavender, basil, sage, chives and oregano are just some of the wonderful varieties that flower in and out of the summer months, so they can support bees throughout the year – and you can use them in your cooking, too.

RETHINK YOUR LAWN Simple but effective, mowing your grass less can really help pollinators to prosper, as can replacing grass with low-growing clover. Wildflower gardens and meadows can be planted as big or as small as you’d like and will provide much-needed nutrition.

BECOME A BEE LANDLORD! Bee hotels are a great way to boost pollinator diversity in your garden as they can attract solitary species.

Solitary bees lay their eggs in the hollow cavities, leaving a small supply of food for the larvae to eat.

The larvae then hatch, pupate and emerge from the stems.

To find out more about what you can do for nature, visit jordanscereals.co.uk

MIKE DILGER’S

WILDLIFE WATCHING IN AN UPLAND HAY MEADOW

In his series of great places to watch wildlife in the UK, the star of BBC One’s The One Show this month heads uphill where the meadow wildflowers are at their best right now and lapwings are taking flight.

loriously flower-rich and sadly in many ways a habitat of a bygone era, Britain’s hay meadows tend to be divided, by those in the know, into two categories. With altitude the key factor, the upland hay meadows – unlike their lowland counterparts – are generally found in a broad swathe above 200m, yet crucially below an altitude of about 400m, where acid grassland or moorland then take over as the dominant vegetative force.

Invariably found on either the valley bottoms or the gentle lower slopes of our upland valleys, these floristically rich meadows tend to have the appearance of small fields, frequently enclosed by stone walls, with many additionally containing their own small, stone barn.

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Confined to the cool climates encountered across much of northern England, with a few outliers in Scotland, their characteristic vegetation is believed to have derived from those plants that survived in wooded glades following the last glacial retreat.

The large-scale woodland clearance by Iron Age civilisations that subsequently ensued would then have seen this more open habitat becoming quickly expanded. This status quo will then have been maintained once these early farmers realised that the meadows not only provided grazing for their livestock for large parts of the year, but also permitted the production of a summer hay crop.

Delicate flower It is this precise cutting and grazing regime that combines to prevent the more coarse

and aggressive plants from smothering the less vigorous – and botanically more interesting – species, while a light application of farmyard manure ensures the soils remain relatively fertile.

Characteristic plants of these upland hay meadows include yellow rattle, globeflower and lady’s mantle, and with the best sites able to support an astonishing 30 species per square metre, this patently is a habitat containing both quality and quantity.

The other main reason for these meadows’ richness, in addition to the way they are managed, is that they represent a meeting ground, where northern species, such as wood cranesbill (or woodland geranium), are able to rub shoulders with plants of a predominantly southern distribution, such as great burnet.

July 2021

WILD JULY

C ockw se from top eft: M ke Pow es/FLPA/M nden; Dav d Chapman/A amy; Ash ey Cooper/A amy; B Coster/FLPA/M nden; Peter Entw st e/FLPA/M nden

Clockwise from top left: Muker Meadows in the Yorkshire Dales are a Site of Special Scientific Interest and a botanist’s delight; wood cranesbill; the sunshine yellow globeflower is a cheering sight from May to July; if you’re lucky you might hear the ‘peewit’ call of a handsome lapwing; a dark green fritillary has a wingspan of 63–69mm.

While this type of habitat management might suit a wide range of flowers, which in turn will produce an abundant nectar source, only a limited cast of animals are able to cope with the radical cutting events. Nevertheless, these hay meadows can still provide nesting sites for birds such as yellow wagtails and lapwings – providing they are not cut until the young have fledged, of course.

The ability to produce winter feed effectively acted as the meadows’ saviour well into the second half of the 20th century. However, the increased use of fertilisers, a switch to winter sheep grazing, and conversion to a silage-based system at the end of the Second World War has resulted in the decimation of a once widespread habitat.

July 2021

BBC Wildlife

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WILD JULY

In fact, recent estimates indicate there are less than 1,000ha of upland hay meadow remaining in northern England, while Scotland collectively conserves no more than 100ha.

Unfortunately, agri-environment schemes focused on conserving the remaining species-rich meadows have had mixed success. However, community-based initiatives that have put the cultural and wildlife importance

Community-based initiatives have helped restore swards degraded during the ‘production at all cost’ years.

of upland hay meadows front and centre have not only helped maintain many existing sites, but have also helped restore some of the swards degraded during the ‘production at all cost’ years.

With hay harvesting generally taking place any time from late July to early August, the upland hay meadow is definitely a spectacle that needs to be visited earlier on this month rather than later. Once cut, the pale-coloured fields will have lost much of their interest.

Finally, do remember that many of the remaining meadows will still be part of private farms, and as they contain a valuable but eminently trample-able crop, it is important to stick to the public rights of way rather than botanising off the beaten track.

The bright yellow, tightly bunched blooms of globeflower have become a far less common sight in recent decades. This striking member of the buttercup family prefers the cool and damp locations offered by upland hay meadows – if they are out of the reach of nibbling sheep!

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1 Balchroich Meadow in Keltneyburn, Perthshire, Scotland, is not strictly a classic upland hay meadow, but has abundant wildflowers, including globeflower and a fine range of orchids.

S P EC I ES TO LO OK OU T FO R Globeflower

C H O IC E LO CATI O N S

Yellow wagtails will nest in the grass of upland hay meadows.

2 Moor House in Upper Teesdale is part of the North Pennines Area of Outstanding Natural Beauty (AONB) and the upland hay meadows contain unique species of lady’s mantle found nowhere else in the world.

3 Bretherdale Hay Meadow Walk in Cumbria offers a 7km round trip taking you past some of the finest upland hay meadows in all of the Lake District.

4 Muker Meadows in Swaledale are

Wood cranesbill

Yellow wagtail Both smaller and sleeker than a pied wagtail, there can be no confusing the bright yellow face and underparts of a male yellow wagtail in summer

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plumage. Raising one or occasionally two broods in pastures, meadows and crop fields, the yellow wagtail is just one of a suite of farmland birds that have seen a large reduction in their population as a direct result of agricultural intensification.

Lapwing Surely our most dapper breeding wader, the dark green back, wispy crest and large butterfly wings obvious in flight make the lapwing distinctive – even to a novice birdwatcher.

Still a common breeding bird on many upland

farms, it can often take five weeks from hatching before the youngsters are finally able to take to the air and out of reach of a range of both mowers and hungry predators.

Dark green fritillary One of our more spectacular fritillaries, the orange-and-black upper wings are eminently confusable with a number of closely related butterflies.

Look for the distinctive mossy green flush underneath the hindwing.

5 Ashes Pasture Nature Reserve in Ribblesdale is managed by the Yorkshire Wildlife Trust and the lower fields contain all the classic hay meadow plants, plus eye-catching specialities such as bird’s eye primrose (pictured below).

Get involved in National Meadows Day, the annual celebration of wildflower meadows across the UK, taking place on 3rd July.

July 2021

Wagtail: Tim Melling/Getty; primula: Ann and Steve Toon/Alamy

Considered the upland equivalent of meadow cranesbill, the wood cranesbill’s smaller purplish-pink flowers contrast with the violet-blue colour of its more common (and southerly) cousin. Wood cranesbill has become the quintessential plant of upland hay meadows and is a nod to to the original forest clearings.

one of the best places to see upland hay meadows from public footpaths in all of the Yorkshire Dales, and four of the meadows were named as one of 60 Coronation Meadows in 2013 by the Prince of Wales.

BY APPOINTMENT TO HER MAJESTY QUEEN ELIZABETH II SWAROVSKI OPTIK SUPPLIER OF BINOCULARS

CL POCKET NATURE IN YOUR POCKET SEE THE UNSEEN

ABOVE Suckling for several weeks after weaning begins from about three weeks old, the pups waste no time in latching on to a teat when the matriarch returns briefly to her litter. “Meerkats appear to be terrible mums, but the alpha female really needs to forage constantly to produce enough milk,” notes Suzi. “She’s much more attentive inside the burrow, cleaning and grooming her pups. When first born, they can’t even urinate or defecate without her help.”

RIGHT Pups engage in play fighting from a young age – this pair is only about three weeks old, and swayed rather drunkenly while tussling. It’s an important skill to master: when meerkat territories overlap, vicious skirmishes between mobs often end in deaths. “Meerkats are among the most murderous mammals,” explains Suzi. “If a subordinate female has a litter, the group’s matriarch might kill the pups.”

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WILDNEWS

By JO CAIRD, SIMON BIRCH, STUART BLACKMAN, and CATHERINE SMALLEY

K E E P I N G YO U U P TO DAT E W I T H T H E B I G N AT U R E STO R I E S

MARINE

Coral reefs centre stage at London Zoo exhibit

Georgette Douwma/Getty

The new aquarium will showcase the world’s corals and scientists’ efforts to halt their decline.

Without effective action to curb CO pollution, we will see the loss of coral reef ecosystems.

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July 2021

Z

SL London Zoo has opened a new exhibit and research facility designed to raise awareness of the threats facing coral reefs around the world due to climate change.

Tiny Giants: From Minibeasts to Coral Reefs, which opened on 17 May, has as its centrepiece a 7m-long tank where aquarists have planted corals rescued from the illegal wildlife trade.

Behind the scenes, they will be working on a raft of projects that aim to safeguard these vital marine ecosystems for the future.

With coral reefs at huge risk from the impacts of climate change – including thermal stress, increased storm severity, disease spread and ocean acidification changes – aquarists around the world are in a race to ensure that all coral species are represented in aquaria. This is no mean feat, given there are over 800 species of coral in our oceans.

Paul Pearce-Kelly, senior curator of invertebrates and fish at ZSL, and his colleagues will also be helping in an international effort to preserve the genetic material of all coral species in cryopreservation biobanks. The project has so far banked about 50 coral species, and ZSL has an important role to play in ensuring that Indian Ocean species collected as part of the organisation’s field work in the Chagos Archipelago are represented in the biobank.

Both of these research strands enable work on breeding resilience into coral species, whether by ‘fragging’ – creating a new colony by planting a piece of coral broken off from an established one – or by inducing corals to spawn.

“Conservation breeding populations [need to be] as resilient as possible if they’re going to be used to help to reseed reefs,” says Pearce-Kelly.

The curator is optimistic about the potential of this work but warns against complacency.

“Without effective action to reduce atmospheric CO levels below 350 parts per million, the stark reality is that no amount of those initiatives will prevent the global loss of coral reef ecosystems,” he says.

“That’s why the exhibit element of our work is so important because we need to really engage visitors and make it clear that it’s our collective influence as citizens and policy makers to get effective action on climate change, which is the ultimate hope that corals have.” Jo Caird

Aquarists are in a race to ensure that all coral species are represented in aquaria.

FIND OUT MORE Visit the exhibit: zsl.org/zsllondon-zoo/whats-on/discover-tiny-giants

July 2021

WILD NEWS

New Government legislation will see the trading of ivory banned.

Below: mountain hares will also be protected.

LEGISLATION

Animal sentience recognised in UK law Ban on hunting trophy imports and review of wildlife crime part of raft of Government measures.

A

26

BBC Wildlife

shark’s fin is removed and its body is discarded – something that has been outlawed in the UK for almost 20 years.

However, a legal loophole that has continued to allow people to carry up to 20kg of dried shark fins in and out of the UK will now be closed. The plan also includes proposals to look at wild animal welfare in the English uplands.

A series of policy reviews will be launched into wildlife crime and the use of snares, plus England’s only population of mountain hares, which can be found in the Peak District, will now be fully protected.

“It’s fantastic news that animal sentience has finally been recognised by the Government and this will help legally protect animals when new laws, policies or trade deals take place,” said Vanessa Amoroso from World Animal Protection.

“A trade deal, though, with Australia or

any country with welfare standards that don’t meet those of the UK goes against the Action Plan for Animal Welfare and is where the new Sentience Bill risks falling short,” she added.

And while welcoming the new proposals, Joshua Kaile, head of programmes and policy at the International Fund for Animal Welfare, believes that a lot can be done to protect wild animals now that does not require new legislation.

“We’d like to see the government guarantee the long-term funding of the National Wildlife Crime Unit and increase the numbers of dedicated wildlife crime police officers across the country,” he said. Simon Birch

FIND OUT MORE The new government plans: bit.ly/ActionPlanAnimalWelfare

July 2021

Ivory: Carl de Souza/AFP/Getty; hare: Darren Dawson/500px/Getty

nimal welfare campaigners have warmly welcomed Government plans to recognise all animals as sentient beings. The pioneering move acknowledges, for the first time in the UK, that animals have the capacity to experience feelings such as pleasure and pain, and the government will now enshrine in law that animals are aware of what is happening to them.

The move to recognise animals as sentient beings is the flagship proposal in a suite of wide-ranging animal conservation and welfare aims set out in the Government’s Action Plan for Animal Welfare.

Among the new measures is a ban on the import of hunting trophies from endangered animals overseas and also on the trade of elephant ivory.

There is a move, too, on the controversial practice of shark finning, whereby a

TIGER WOODS Follow a raptor monitor as she delves deep into the forests of Shropshire in search of a rare but particularly magnificent bird of prey: the goshawk.

Chris O’Reilly/naturepl.com (controlled conditions)

By Katie Lloyd

The goshawk is a most formidable hunter and a fierce-looking bird.

Their broad wings allow them to hunt at speed, crashing to the forest floor and even pursuing prey on foot.

WILD NEWS BIOLOGY

Genome studies reveal four giraffe species

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ew research supports the idea that there are four species of giraffe, not one. A comparison of the entire genomes of 50 individuals from across Africa found that they divide into seven distinct subspecies, which can be grouped into four full species: northern, southern, Masai and reticulated.

The results “have great significance for giraffe conservation”, says co-author Julian Fennessy of the Giraffe Conservation

Foundation in a statement. “[T]here are less than 6,000 northern giraffes remaining in the wild. As a species, they are one of the most threatened large mammals in the world.”

According to Fred Bercovitch of the Anne Innis Dagg Foundation, who was not involved in the research, the findings provide robust support for the idea of distinct sub-groups of giraffe, (the International Union for Conservation of Nature recognises one species split

into eight to ten subspecies). But, he says, the decision to classify something as a species or a subspecies is more subjective than scientific.

“You could view giraffe as one species with eight subspecies, or as eight separate species. That’s a choice, like what’s the best flavour ice cream. What I don’t agree with is splitting giraffe into two, three or four species, because that’s just arbitrary,” he says. “Let’s conserve them regardless of what they are called.”

FIND OUT MORE Current Biology: bit.ly/ GiraffeGenome

Previously it was thought there was only one species of giraffe.

TRUTH OR FICTION?

There’s no escaping Asian hornets Is there any way to survive attacks from this wasp?

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The Asian hornet was first sighted in the UK in 2016.

the cost of controlling them will total about £7.5 million annually.

These fearsome aerial predators of other insects (they seem particularly partial to honeybees) are not generally aggressive towards humans, but will defend their nests vigorously and in numbers. They have a potent sting and have been responsible for several deaths in France and Spain.

So how do you avoid being stung if you stumble upon a nest? In South Korea, Japan and China, advice from authorities and the media includes standing still, sitting or laying down, and walking – not running – away slowly. However, this has not been tested properly. Until now.

Research carried out in South Korea and published in the journal Entomological Research shows that running away – and fast – is exactly what you should do.

Retreat slowly, or crouch, sit or lay down, and the attacks continue, up to a distance of 300m. Turn and flee, though, and the assault stops quickly. Stuart Blackman

July 2021

G raffe: Getty; hornet: Cyr Ruoso/naturep .com

WANT TO COMMENT? Email wildlifeletters@ immediate.co.uk

SINCE ITS accidental introduction to France from China in 2004, the Asian hornet has spread spectacularly across northern Europe. In Spain, in 2019, 25,000 nests were destroyed in Galicia alone. And it’s heading our way.

There have been 19 confirmed sightings in England since 2016, including 10 established nests, and it is estimated that

WILD OPINION

MY WAY OF THINKING

MARK CARWARDINE The conservationist discusses Britain’s new fossil fuel projects, from airports to coal mines, and invites your thoughts on the subject.

’m exasperated by the number of naive and self-serving politicians who argue that new carbonintensive industries ‘will boost the local economy’. Everyone from ministers to local councillors have been giving the green light to so many ill-considered schemes it’s hard to believe they’ve even heard of the climate crisis.

Take the new £150m terminal at Leeds Bradford Airport. It’s all very well for the director of the Northern Powerhouse Partnership to embellish the green credentials of the building itself, but what about the proposed increase in annual capacity from four million passengers to seven million?

As one campaigner pointed out, it’s like cutting down the Amazon rainforest with an environmentally friendly axe.

That extra capacity would require at least 15,000 more flights every year, resulting in a 75 per cent increase in emissions over the next 10 years.

Yet Leeds City Council approved the expansion, claiming that carbon emissions from international flights “should be primarily tackled at a national level”.

Leeds Bradford is a test case that could open the floodgates. If all current airport expansion plans were approved, UK capacity could surge from 297 million passengers in 2019 to 532 million by 2050. Even the Government’s own climate advisors warn that this would be a very bad idea.

Then there was the decision to continue exploring the North Sea for new oil and gas reserves. We should have followed Denmark’s lead (the EU’s largest oil producer has banned all new exploration licences) but, instead, ministers promised to devise a “climate

Anna Gowthorpe/PA Images/Alamy

I

July 2021

S As Joe Biden

compatibility test” to determine whether drilling applications are “compatible with the UK’s climate change objectives”.

My guess is that no oil or gas exploration would be compatible with any climate change objectives.

Another shocking project under review is the construction of the UK’s first deep coal mine in 30 years. The already infamous colliery, in Cumbria, is scheduled to extract up to 2.78m tonnes of coking coal a year, for use in steel production.

Advocates argue that it will create hundreds of jobs and that we need coking coal to produce steel. But this particular coal is too sulphurous to be used to make steel in Britain, so about 85 per cent of it will have to be exported. (That’s another win for the Government because, in theory, it can still meet its ‘net zero’ targets by depositing all those greenhouse gas

points out, jobs come with state investment in green technologies.T

A new terminal is set for take off at Leeds Bradford.

emissions on other nations’ books.)

Yet again, the Government failed to intervene, with the brilliant excuse that it was a ‘local issue’. You can imagine the joy at 10 Downing Street, though: “It’s perfect – we’ll win the votes of working-class northerners, in Labour’s historical heartland, and make the greenies see red at the same time”.

Under pressure from the USA, it has been forced to do a U-turn. But who knows what will happen – the company responsible is now taking legal action.

If every government made similarly dreadful decisions, the world would be toast. But it’s particularly bad for ours to be so out of touch in the year we are hosting COP26.

Besides, polluting megaprojects are not ‘necessary evils’. There are other ways of boosting local economies, and alternative technologies. It is technically possible to produce steel with hydrogen instead of coal, for example, so we should be supporting efforts to make this a commercial reality. And, as Joe Biden points out, jobs come with state investment in green technologies.

In the meantime, the House of Commons should provide compulsory evening classes for politicians who are shamelessly ignorant about climate change. They can start by writing an essay titled: ‘Why tackling climate change trumps every single greenhouse gas-producing business enterprise that passes across my desk’.

MARK CARWARDINE is a frustrated and frank conservationist.

WHAT DO YOU THINK? If you want to support Mark in his views or shoot him down in flames, email wildlifeletters@immediate.co.uk

BBC Wildlife

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WILD NEWS

MEET THE SCIENTIST

Kristal Ambrose Environmental scientist and founder of Bahamas Plastic Movement For Kristal Ambrose, Goldman Prize winner 2020, grassroots youth activism is key to finding solutions to worldwide environmental challenges. hen Kristal Ambrose – aka Kristal Ocean – an environmental scientist, decided to lobby for an end to pollution from single-use plastics in her native Bahamas, her first thought was a letter-writing campaign.

When she took the idea to young people involved with Bahamas Plastic Movement (BPM), the non-profit organisation Ambrose founded in 2013, however, they told her she needed to think bigger.

Ambrose did just that, hosting a youth activism workshop whose

Beach clean-up projects are an important part of the BPM’s work.

W

can be very traditional and the students really

are now working on a blueprint that other environmental grassroots organisations around the world will be able to use to empower their own young people to lobby for the changes they want.

Ambrose, who is working on a PhD in marine debris monitoring for the Caribbean region, first woke up to the devastating effects of plastic pollution on our oceans on a 2012 research trip to the Great Pacific Garbage Patch. This mass of non-biodegradable debris is the result of ocean currents carrying rubbish from all around the Pacific Ocean.

“That’s when the plastics message clicked for me,” she says. Upon returning home, she founded the Plastic Beach Project, a citizen-sciencebased initiative studying

FIND OUT MORE The educational organisation Ambrose set up: bahamasplastic movement.org

July 2021

Kristal: Bahamas Plastic Movement; bird: William Simmons

Plastic pollution is catastrophic for wildlife that ingest small particles of it.

S I feel like my approach

plastic pollution on beaches in the Bahamas, which in turn led her to set up BPM. “I was working at a particular organisation and even though it was rooted in the Bahamas, nothing research-wise or conservation-wise was truly going back to the community. I resented that. I was like, ‘I’ve got to do something’, and I took it and ran with it and I’m still running.”

Through its educational programmes – including the Plastic Pollution Education and Ocean Conservation Camp – and beach clean-up projects, BPM has worked with over 1,000 young people on eight Bahamian islands. Engaging them with the issues of marine plastic pollution – from injuries to marine species due to suffocation and ingestion, to the impacts on our food and health, climate change and tourism – isn’t just for their benefit and that of marine ecosystems in the Bahamas, says Ambrose.

“I learn so much from the students. I feel like sometimes my approach can be very traditional and the students really push me to think.” Jo Caird

OUR WILD WORLD The song of the humpback whale takes centre stage in Fathom on Apple TV+.

TV

Fathom APPLE TV+, 25 JUNE

WI LD STRE A M TV SERIES Iolo’s Pembrokeshire: The Wild West A guided tour of Pembrokeshire’s stunning scenery and beautiful wildlife.

BBC One Wales, from 5 July DOCUMENTARY Breaking Boundaries: The Science of Our Planet Attenborough’s new programme looks at how humanity’s actions are threatening the planet.

Netflix, streaming now YOUTUBE SERIES Crash Course Zoology Series exploring the world of animals, hosted by wildlife ecologist Dr Rae Wynn-Grant. bit.ly/CrashCourseZoology

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life, with long days tracking sounds produced by humpbacks – not always hearing anything – can help put things into perspective.

Catching the occasional glimpse of a whale or hearing their song gives a real feeling of excitement, but the documentary can seem a little slow at times. If you need a sense of something greater while seeing the work that goes into asking and researching important wildlife questions, then Fathom is one to watch.

Stephanie Organ, Science writer

BOOK

BOOK

Women on Nature

Much Ado About Mothing

EDITED BY KATHARINE NORBURY, UNBOUND, £25.00

In the past, what we might have thought of as nature writing in Britain, Ireland and our archipelago’s islands, has mainly been associated with men. In her introduction to this anthology, Norbury wonders what would happen if she, “coppiced the woodland” allowing light to shine on the other half of the population.

This book encompasses the writing of 119 women, and spans 700 years.

Through forms as diverse as fiction, recipes and poetry, this collection not only helps to illuminate historical and contemporary voices, but also makes you reconsider the meaning of the nature writing genre. You might not enjoy all the pieces equally, but those you love will leave you craving more.

In 2019, Lowen undertook a quest to see the rarest and most remarkable moths in Britain. Travelling across fens and along clifftops, from Cornwall to the Scottish Highlands, he guides us through his year of moths.

This journey introduces the reader to many astonishing species, and along the way we meet a broad range of people that share Lowen’s passion for recording and conserving moths, including his young daughter who is also utterly enchanted by them. In his words: “Moths are just butterflies with bad PR.” This book seeks to rectify that – and is, indeed, rather good PR for moths.

Jane Adams, Nature writer

Ashleigh Whiffin, Entomologist

BY JAMES LOWEN, BLOOMSBURY, £18.99

July 2021

Getty Images

If you have ever dreamed of communicating with animals, then this documentary by Apple TV+ gives an insight into two scientists’ individual quests into the deep with the aim of understanding how and why humpback whales communicate.

Set on opposite sides of the globe, Fathom shows the challenges and emotions involved in fieldwork studying the humpback whales’ complex ‘song’. If you thought lockdown felt lonely, then the researchers’ isolation from ‘normal’

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REGENT HONEYEATER

A captive-bred regent honeyeater takes flight at a feeding station in Melbourne Zoo. The Critically Endangered songbird is reared in captivity to bolster numbers and safeguard its future in Australia.

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BBC Wildlife

July 2021

REGENT HONEYEATER

THE VOICE The regent honeyeater – a tiny bird found in Australian forests – has become so rare that it is forgetting how to sing its own song.

Words Jo Caird | Photos Doug Gimesy

C

onservation biologist Ross Crates was in the midst of designing a new monitoring programme for the Critically Endangered regent honeyeater when he realised that something was seriously up with the way this Australian songbird was expressing itself.

As he and his colleagues in the Difficult Bird Research Group at the Australian National University toured regent breeding sites around New South Wales, Crates became aware of individual birds whose songs just didn’t sound right. Rather than singing their own songs, these regent males were making calls belonging to other species of bird.

Crates began recording the songs of every wild male regent honeyeater he came across. He was struck by what he found. “It wasn’t just one or two individuals singing weird songs. It’s a decent proportion of the wild population,” says the scientist.

He recalls one bird in particular which, over the course of a six-week observation period, didn’t sing its own song once.

Instead this individual was making the call of another Australian native songbird, called the little friarbird.

July 2021

“I was thinking, this is properly weird: this is a bird that probably doesn’t even know that he’s a regent honeyeater.”

Birds singing other species’ songs is a well-observed phenomenon. There are plenty of bird species that use vocal mimicry to their benefit: by imitating the call of a predator to scare competitors away from a nest, for example, or to impress a potential mate with a wide vocal range.

But what these regent honeyeater males are doing isn’t mimicry, explains Crates, because for something to count as mimicry it has to offer some fitness advantage.

Singing other birds’ songs instead of their own “actually comes at a cost to the regent honeyeaters, because they’re less likely to be paired and less likely to nest”. These birds should be singing like other regents – the fact that they’re not is simply a mistake.

So why do they do it? We don’t know for sure, but Crates’ theory is that a drop in population density is to blame. The first Europeans who settled in Australia wrote of these beautiful black-and-yellow birds flocking in their hundreds; today there are thought to be fewer than 400 individuals in the wild, living in more isolated conditions.

The range of the regent honeyeater has diminished significantly from the days BBC Wildlife

39

REGENT HONEYEATER

when it could be found all the way from central Queensland to Adelaide – a result of habitat lost to agricultural and urban development. Nonetheless, the species still occupies a territory double the size of England today, the birds covering distances of hundreds of kilometres as they follow the flowering of their favourite species of eucalypt trees to feed on the nectar.

Regent fathers do not sing until they’ve chased their offspring away from the nest, so juvenile birds develop their songs by copying other adults in their flock. Reduced flock sizes mean that there simply aren’t enough other adults around to learn from, so young birds are picking up the songs of other species instead, Crates believes.

More worrying still, even the regents that are singing their own song aren’t all getting it quite right. Crates observed large numbers of males singing an abbreviated version of typical regent songs, potentially a result of a ‘copying error’ that was able to spread without correction because numbers are so low. In fact, when compared to 40

BBC Wildlife

Reduced flock sizes mean that there simply aren’t enough other adults around to learn songs from. historical recordings made between 1986 and 2011, recent recordings show that song complexity as a whole has declined significantly over time.

It’s not clear from this research whether the loss of the regents’ so-called ‘song culture’ contributes to ongoing population decline or is just a symptom of that decline.

Either way, says Crates, it spells bad news for the species.

“Once you find that they’re starting to lose their songs already, that’s a real alarm call that all is not well and hasn’t been for many,

Anti-clockwise from top left: a release site in New South Wales; the captivebred regents arrive; Emily Mowat (left) and Dean Ingwersen (middle), both from BirdLife Australia, and Michael Shiels

(right), from Taronga Zoo Sydney, prepare the birds for release; they stay in tents for several days to help them acclimatise; a radio transmitter is carefully attached.

many decades. Once that extinction vortex kicks in it’s very, very hard to bring a species back out of it.”

The scale of the problem That’s not to say we shouldn’t give it a good go. The findings around the loss of song culture are a disappointment for those fighting for the future of the regent honeyeater, but they also represent a positive opportunity.

“It adds another level of complexity to the story. It probably makes the challenge July 2021

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kk Gems in the Dunes – the special and scarce species surviving on the Sefton Coast kk The multicoloured swap shop – the strange science behind animals that can change colour kk Bug banquet – is it time we considered putting insects on the menu to save the planet?

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REGENT HONEYEATER

to manipulate the sound of these captive birds to best reflect what the wild birds at the targeted release sites sound like.” By doing so, he hopes to be able to improve those birds’ chances of finding mates and breeding in the wild.

Ingwersen, Shiels and the rest of the wider regent honeyeater conservation community have long been aware of the idiosyncrasies of regent honeyeater song.

Birds living mainly in the Blue Mountains have a distinct call from those living mainly in the Northern Tablelands. Birds bred in captivity have developed their own unique version, distinct from both of those regional variations.

Acting on a hunch that the song mismatch might hinder captive-bred birds’ attempts to mate with wild regents, the keeper team at Taronga started playing recordings of wild bird calls into the aviaries of juvenile regent honeyeaters as far back as 2008. They’re still at it today, Crates’ song culture work having leant 42

BBC Wildlife

weight to that initial hunch. What’s new are the methods that scientists and keepers are using to address the problem – and the urgency with which they’re tackling it.

“Teaching the young captive males is the only way that we can do anything to try to maintain the song culture in the wild population,” says Crates.

As well as playing recordings of wild calls to juvenile captive-bred birds, Appleby is exploring the impact of learning from ‘live tutors’ – regent honeyeaters captured from the wild and kept in adjacent aviaries.

“I use the analogy with humans,” explains Ingwersen. “You can listen to a tape but if you’ve never heard the language before, is the person angry or are they happy? Because you don’t actually get to watch the expression on the face.

That’s a question that’s unresolved at the moment: is that part of their learning process?”

The ultimate aim of Appleby’s work is to

Taronga Zoo started playing recordings of wild bird calls into the aviaries of juvenile regents. see “better results in released birds finding mates and having better survivability”, he explains. But even if this new research is successful in those terms – and it’s early days yet, with Appleby’s tutoring study still ongoing – this is just one piece of a very complicated conservation puzzle.

Fighting on all fronts Releasing birds may bolster the wild population but is “useless if you don’t do other things,” says Shiels.

Twice a year, Taronga staff and volunteers take part in a mass tree-planting programme in the Capertee Valley, 135km July 2021

Clockwise from top left: the seeds of long-flowered mistletoe; these are collected and then transplanted into spotted gum trees to help spread this important food of the regent

honeyeater; the birds adjust to life in the wild; a captive-bred bird is held pre-release; Kristy Peters from BirdLife Australia records the position of a tree seeded with mistletoe.

north-west of Sydney, organised by BirdLife Southern NSW. In the 28 years since the programme has been running, 272ha of regent honeyeater habitat has been revegetated, including planting more than 100,000 trees.

Elsewhere across south-eastern Australia, BirdLife engages with the community via training workshops and information days to raise awareness of the plight of the species and lobby on its behalf. It also works with government agencies to protect crucial parcels of land from future development.

In areas where regent honeyeater habitat has been damaged by forest fires – an July 2021

The final swan song?

trajectory if we do nothing is really bad. I could conceivably see this thing disappear in my lifetime.”

There is a scenario, however, in which regent honeyeaters could become selfsustaining in the wild in 15 to 20 years, Ingwersen explains. “If we can improve breeding outcomes, if we can keep securing and restoring habitat, if we can get the captive breeding and the song stuff right, and we release enough birds regularly enough, there was a model that showed that there’s light at the end of the tunnel.”

The alternative is too grim to contemplate, not just for the regents but for the wider environment they inhabit. “We really don’t know what happens to this ecosystem if regent honeyeaters disappear. It occurs over such a wide range. There’s a lot of habitat and a lot of ecological systems and services that are at risk if you lose a species like the regent honeyeater.”

“It really feels at the moment like this species is doing the death by a thousand cuts,” says Ingwersen. Recent regent honeyeater population viability analysis by the Difficult Bird Research Group makes for sobering reading, he goes on. “The

JO CAIRD is a freelance journalist based in the UK. You can read more about her writing by visiting her website: jocaird.com.

increasing occurrence as the climate crisis causes longer and more-severe droughts – BirdLife is using innovative methods to safeguard one of the birds’ favourite foods.

Trials are currently taking place that see arborists clambering high into the crowns of eucalypt trees to recolonize their branches with mistletoe, a parasitic plant whose nectar the regent honeyeater feeds on.

“No one’s done this at the scale we’re trying to,” says Ingwersen.

Another challenge facing regents is nest predation by birds such as pied currawongs and noisy miners, as well as mammals including sugar gliders and brushtail possums – species no longer being challenged by predation themselves due to shifts higher up the food-chain. BirdLife has been trialling trunk collars to try to limit marsupials’ access to the regents’ nests.

BBC Wildlife

43

Talking point

EXTINCTION A FORCE Today, extinction is a term we associate with the spiralling loss of species at human hands.

Yet it is also an entirely natural phenomenon that is as creative as it is destructive.

Illustration by Richard Bizley/ Science Photo Library

By Ben Garrod

or as long as there has been life on Earth, there has been extinction.

It’s easy to assume that extinction must be a terrible thing, and that we should do everything we can to stop a species from disappearing. We strive to avoid death throughout our lives, so we naturally see extinction as something to fight. But just as death will come to each of us, every species of animal, plant, fungus and microbe will eventually be consigned to the history books.

One million species across the planet are currently threatened with extinction. It’s a devastating statistic that instils an instant fight response. But as we place extinction under the microscope, we learn that it is a wholly natural biological process that actually helps to drive evolution. Species evolve; they adapt and they go extinct.

It’s a difficult and confusing narrative during a global ecological emergency, but if we are to stand any chance in prioritising species for conservation, saving vulnerable habitats and ecosystems, and ensuring we are not responsible for one of the most devastating episodes in the history of life on Earth, then we need to understand extinction itself.

F

So, what drives extinction, and what makes some species disappear more easily than others? We associate the word ‘extinction’ with two things. First, the dinosaurs, because they’re probably the group we most associate as having gone through the extinction process. There’s every chance a Triceratops is galloping through your thoughts right now.

Second, we often think that if something has gone extinct then maybe it was not quite up to the job, and possibly even deserved to disappear. This idea has been debated to explain the loss of the dinosaurs and even some of our own relatives, such as the Neanderthals.

Both are wrong. First, the dinosaurs are not the only group to have faced extinction (and in fact have never completely died out, but that’s another story). The trilobites, another prehistoric megastar group, was also lost through no fault of its own. Comprising at least 20,000 known species that inhabited almost every type of marine habitat imaginable, the trilobites disappeared after a reign of more than 300 million years. It took the most devastating blow to life on Earth – the Permian mass extinction – to finally eradicate these armoured marine arthropods.

Second, going extinct is a natural part of the cycle of a species. It has nothing to do with how ‘good’ or ‘bad’ it is. The dinosaurs

dominated the planet for more than 160 million years before the asteroid struck, and our prehistoric Neanderthal relatives thrived for several hundred thousand before disappearing in all but their genes.

And don’t think extinction simply picks off the weak and small. Ancient apex predators, such as the ratchet-jawed Dunkleosteus from the Devonian period, and megalodon, the largest predatory shark of all time, have also been claimed. Even T.rex, the ultimate Cretaceous predator, succumbed despite being perfectly suited to its environment. hen looking at extinction as a concept, we talk about being ‘extinct in the wild’, a straightforward term, and ‘functionally extinct’, which can refer to a situation where only one sex of a species is left, or when the last remaining individuals cannot reproduce. Fundamentally, the definition of extinct is the point when the last individual of a species or group dies.

Because extinction has been present since the first life forms on Earth popped into existence, then by default this must mean that an almost incomprehensible number of species have come and gone. Research estimates that as many as 99 per cent of the

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An 11km-wide asteroid caused the extinction of the dinosaurs, such as hadrosaurs (left) and T.rex (centre), as well as some mammals (right).

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species that have ever lived have gone extinct, which may translate to as many as five billion species exiting our planet. To be precise with this number is difficult, because even today, the estimated number of living species varies between 10 million and a trillion, with only 1.2 million so far documented.

A species typically has about 10 million years of evolving – eating, chasing, building nests and even going to the Moon – before it goes extinct. Some last for longer; some for less time. A few species of deep-sea fish, such as some members of the seven-gilled cow shark group, have been around for more than 60 million years; the unusual horsetails have remained largely unchanged since the early Jurassic period, some 170 million years ago. A possible winner for the title ‘ultimate survivor’ may go to the horseshoe crab, which has remained in its current form for about 20 million years. Prior to that, it showed few differences for 150 million years and, as a group, stretches back an impressive 420 million years. At the other end of the scale, at least 500 species of fish in the East African Lake Victoria are thought to be less than 15,000 years old, and a very ‘new’ species of Galapagos finch only split from its cousins in 1981. very species evolves to fit a particular ecosystem or habitat and acts in a way that will help it survive and have young.

Extinction happens when a species can no longer survive in its ecological niche. Lots of different things can cause this, and some are more natural than others. Some kill off a single species, others cause the loss of many at once, making extinction one of the most complex and important areas of study in science. The dodo is a good example of a single species driven to extinction (when sailors arrived on its Mauritius island home at the turn of the 17th century); as are the passenger pigeon, thylacine, Steller’s sea cow and countless others. In contrast, the infamous asteroid wiped out 75 per cent of life on our planet in one go. Nothing larger than a sheep survived. Put simply, the common denominator for extinction is either when something happens too quickly or is too severe to overcome.

Imagine that a species of frog lives on one tiny island, and a volcano erupts, covering the frogs’ home with lava. If the eruption is sudden and the frogs have no time to escape and nowhere to hide, then it’s froggy finale. But if the eruption happens slowly and some individuals

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manage to flee to a rocky ledge or stream spared by the lava, the species will survive.

Not only will the frogs have escaped extinction, they could also be shaped by the experience. The phenomenally high selective pressures associated with extinction bring the opportunity for natural selection. The frogs that survived the catastrophe might have had particular traits or adaptations that gave them the slightest edge. Perhaps they could move more quickly, tolerate higher temperatures or hide more effectively. These characteristics are thus ‘selected’ for the next generation. (Of course, the opposite could happen, leaving the remaining population with a reduced gene pool.)

Evolution isn’t directional, it doesn’t have a sense of purpose and it isn’t aiming for something. It’s a long line of random mutations that might either decrease or increase the chance of survival of that individual, and ultimately that species. But when a species, or group of species, goes extinct, nature does what it always does – it creates an opportunity for others. Nature hates a vacuum. It’s as if it can’t sit still, and needs to doodle or hum to pass the time.

When opportunities arise, ‘newcomer’ organisms don’t consciously think about conquering new environments or habitats.

They develop if the right mutations come

From top to bottom: before the marine life we know today, our oceans were teeming with trilobites and home to giant cephalopods, such as Endoceras; even the formidable predator Dunkleosteus, which could crush almost anything in its powerful jaws, became another victim of extinction; up until 500 years ago the giant Haast's eagle could be found in New Zealand.

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along at the right time, and when there is little or no competition. Extinction, then, is ultimately responsible for the development of new species. This emergence of ‘new’ organisms is known as ‘speciation’ and with it, we often see evolutionary convergence, where unrelated groups overcome the same problems – flying, swimming or feeding – by different means, and analogous traits, where different anatomical structures perform similar roles across different species or groups, but are from different evolutionary lineages.

There are many examples of speciation where a ‘new’ group replaces another lost to extinction, but one of the clearest is when the large predatory marine reptiles disappeared at the end of the Cretaceous period, 66 million years ago. With all these vertebrates suddenly gone from the oceans, a massive ecological gap was there for the taking. Within 10 or 15 million years, the first whales appeared in the fossil record, walking into the shallows and evolving into the behaviourally and physically diverse group of cetaceans we see today. Without that particular mass extinction, whales, dolphins and porpoises would probably have never existed. One group’s misfortune was another’s lucky day. xtinction, then, can be argued as being the most creative evolutionary force in nature, helping to give rise to the dazzling biodiversity we see now and throughout the fossil record.

I’m not suggesting, though, that we step back and let the process run unchecked.

Extinction is also a destructive force, and has the power to

Illustrations by Gabriel Ugueto

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“Extinction might be the most creative evolutionary force in nature, helping to give rise to dazzling biodiversity.”

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change the face of the planet. The entire story of life on Earth has been punctuated by catastrophic events of mass extinction, often over surprisingly short periods – such as the 11km-wide asteroid that hurtled towards Mexico at the end of the Cretaceous mass extinction.

While the loss of a single species rarely has a widespread cascade effect, the seismic shift in the diversity and accumulation of life brought about by a mass extinction can take tens of millions of years to recover from, leaving a scar on the timeline of life. As I write, approximately one million species are heading towards the cliff, such as the Hainan gibbon in China, with fewer than 30 individuals left.

Thanks to human-driven habitat destruction, pollution, introduced species, disease, hunting, climate change and various other influences, the rate and pattern of species decline and loss we are seeing now is as much as 10,000 times higher than you’d typically expect, which, based on evidence from the fossil record, usually sits at about one species per million per year. Our current rate of loss rivals some of the worst from previous mass extinctions and will be the first mass extinction event in the past 3.5 billion years that has been caused by a single species.

When we peer back through the millions of species in the fossil record, we see an amazing variation stretching back for hundreds of millions of years.

Whole groups have risen and fallen, to be succeeded by new biological pioneers. All the while, extinction waits like a spectre in the shadows, punctuating the timeline of each and every species. Every so often, these losses come together into worldchanging episodes of widespread mass extinction. Our best chance is to look back at these catastrophes and better understand the science of extinction – and then fight as hard as we can to avoid creating our very own Earth-changing event.

BEN GARROD is professor of evolutionary biology and science engagement at the University of East Anglia. Books one to three in his new eightpart book series, EXTINCT: The Story of Life on Earth (Zephyr, £15) are out now.

WANT TO COMMENT? Has Ben changed your view of extinction? Tell us what you think by emailing us at wildlifeletters@immediate.co.uk BBC Wildlife

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Meerkat mother Maghogho stands imperiously above her five young pups while their father (rear) and her subadult son (far right) stand sentinel. After about two weeks in the natal burrow, from early February the curious infants had begun to peek out.

Soon they were joining the adults in ritual sunbathing sessions. “Each morning they’d emerge and expose their mostly hairless bellies to the rays like solar panels,” recalls Suzi, who photographed this family album in northern Botswana’s Makgadikgadi Pans, on the fringes of the Kalahari Desert.

Mob

Photographer Suzi Eszterhas Words Paul Bloomfield

rule Photo story

In the well-defined strata of meerkat society, Mum’s firmly in charge – but, despite the dominance of a fierce matriarch, it takes a mob to raise a litter of hungry, playful pups.

Keep up with Maghogho and her plucky group.

These three pups’ intense expression is surely hunger, as they await the return of their father with a morsel of food – typically a beetle or insect larva. Maghogho is conspicuous by her absence: an alpha female leaves almost all parenting responsibilities to other members of her mob. “A beautiful thing about meerkat society is that all adults babysit and feed the pups during the day – all except Mum, who leaves them to it,” explains Suzi.

PHOTO STORY MEERKATS

ABOVE The approaching dusk prompts a dash back to the burrow, with Dad chivvying along his pups, picking up and carrying any tardy offspring who lags behind. “It’s not a stroll home – it’s a race,” says Suzi. To capture these eye-level shots, she had to get down low – very low. “I spent weeks on my belly,” she recalls. “You don’t stand with these guys. You barely even sit. But it was entrancing to enter the meerkats’ world at their own level.”

RIGHT What to do with a meal that’s as big as your own face? That’s the challenge confronting this three-week-old youngster presented with food by an adult. “The pup needs to learn how to capture and kill prey,” says Suzi. “Dung beetles are big, with hard shells, so the infants were initially a bit intimidated by them. This one doesn’t quite know what to do with the insect, but needs to work it out quickly: in seconds, the adult will snatch it and eat it for themselves.”

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PHOTO STORY MEERKATS

BELOW Foraging, playing, digging, learning, eating: life is tiring for young meerkats – but there’s always time for a nap.

Maghogho’s pups piled together for a snooze at least a dozen times daily, invariably with one of the adults keeping watch, ready to wake and usher them into a temporary burrow nearby should a threat arise. Over the weeks she spent with the mob, Suzi learned to identify each individual pup by appearance – particularly the colour and shape of its snout – and behaviour.

ABOVE Dad undertakes a final scan of the landscape before retreating with his pups into the overnight burrow. Each gang moves between subterranean dens spread across its territory, typically staying about a week in each. Though proficient diggers, meerkats usually adapt and extend existing tunnel systems excavated by ground squirrels or other mongooses; some burrows are over 5m across and 2m deep, with up to 15 entrances.

LEFT After heavy rain flooded the area, the mob was left stranded on a patch of higher ground. “Though meerkats loathe water, Maghogho tried to lead the group across to forage in another part of her territory, nearly drowning her litter,” says Suzi. “But she soon had to abort the mission, carrying this pup back to safety.”

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LEFT The sight of an approaching bird of prey sends a startled meerkat scurrying for the safety of a burrow, its slender tail – unlike the bushy appendages of other mongoose species – held vertically in the stereotypical running gait.

Meerkats can hit 32km/h and have excellent eyesight, able to detect an eagle from some 300m away. They produce a range of vocalisations to alert cohorts. Studies suggest that variations in warning calls may distinguish between types of predator spotted – a raptor, snake or jackal, for example – and perceived threat levels, possibly relating to distance.

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PHOTO STORY MEERKATS

RIGHT A scorpion, killed and delivered by one of the mob’s adults, makes a tasty treat for a pup – meerkats are immune to their venom.

Insects and other invertebrates make up most of their diet, though they also occasionally eat small reptiles, birds and frogs. “Meerkats seem to use their ranges wisely,” says Suzi, “foraging intensively in one area for perhaps a week before moving on, allowing insect populations to recover.”

BELOW A vigilant adult keeps tabs on the pups as they charge across an open area in a row, tails aloft. A meerkat mob typically consists of a breeding pair and their offspring, but may include other families to total 30 or more. These other adults all babysit the dominant female’s pups.

On reaching sexual maturity at about a year old, young adults often leave the group to join or take over other gangs.

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With Mum, Dad (front) and older brother distracted by an aerial threat – a hawk or eagle soaring above – the pups aren’t going to miss the opportunity to suckle while Maghogho makes one of her infrequent daytime appearances.

The family has gathered at a burrow entrance, ready to dive inside if the bird attacks. Their response to a snake would be much more pugnacious, clustering together to scare and, if necessary, mob their assailant. Being small mammals, only about 30cm long, meerkats need to work cooperatively, with adults sharing sentinel responsibilities.

ABOVE Suckling for several weeks after weaning begins from about three weeks old, the pups waste no time in latching on to a teat when the matriarch returns briefly to her litter. “Meerkats appear to be terrible mums, but the alpha female really needs to forage constantly to produce enough milk,” notes Suzi. “She’s much more attentive inside the burrow, cleaning and grooming her pups. When first born, they can’t even urinate or defecate without her help.”

RIGHT Pups engage in play fighting from a young age – this pair is only about three weeks old, and swayed rather drunkenly while tussling. It’s an important skill to master: when meerkat territories overlap, vicious skirmishes between mobs often end in deaths. “Meerkats are among the most murderous mammals,” explains Suzi. “If a subordinate female has a litter, the group’s matriarch might kill the pups.”

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PHOTO STORY MEERKATS

BELOW Maghogho seems to gaze longingly across the floodwaters surrounding the island on which her family is temporarily marooned, hungry for the rich pickings available on the land beyond – if only she could reach it. “There’s a real sense of a queen surveying her realm,” says Suzi, “which reflects the way she and her pups were treated by the rest of the mob – like royalty.”

SUZI ESZTERHAS is an award-winning wildlife photographer documenting animal family life. suzieszterhas.com

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Why

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Clockwise from above: poplar hawkmoth; clouded buff moth; least carpet moth; garden tiger moth; yellow shell moth; least carpet moth; Fisher's estuarine moth; fivespot burnet moth; Fisher's estuarine; and emperor moth.

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F sher’s estuarine: Dirk Funhoff/NPL/Alamy; Five spot burnet: Larry Corbett/Alamy; emperor & poplar hawkmoth: Getty; least carpet & clouded buff: Gianpiero Ferrari/FLPA/Minden; yellow shell: Rod Williams/naturepl.com

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n his book The Moth Snowstorm, journalist Michael McCarthy recalls childhood nights when the airspace above British roads was so congested with flying moths that drivers had to stop regularly to clear windscreens of their splattered forms.

Now but a distant memory, insect blizzards were already petering out when the Rothamsted Insect Survey began recording moths nationwide in the 1960s.

In March, that initiative – complemented by tens of millions of observations gathered by thousands of citizen scientists through the National Moth Recording Scheme – generated several stark revelations: that

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Britain has one-third fewer larger moths today than five decades ago; that four times more species are declining than are increasing; and that nearly one in five British moths is in real or potential risk of national extinction.

The worrisome findings were announced by wildlife charity Butterfly Conservation, Rothamsted Research and the UK Centre for Ecology and Hydrology. Updating assessments from 2006 and 2013, The State of Britain’s Larger Moths 2021 report strengthens growing evidence that insects are vanishing across swathes of the world.

“Though no bolt from the blue – we’ve been raising the alarm about moth declines

Though largely disliked by the general public, moths provide valuable ecological services – which makes

oths Words James Lowen

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since the early 2000s – this decline is very worrying,” says lead author Richard Fox. Worse, Richard fears that moths may prove the tip of a melting invertebrate iceberg. If something is wrong with moths, other insects are also likely imperilled: “Long-term trends for larger British moths provide a window onto insect groups for which no comparable data exists.”

Nevertheless, Richard resists joining the media bandwagon proclaiming the world to be suffering an ‘insect Armageddon’.

Although “using cataclysmic terminology may get politicians to listen,” he says, “the data shows that we’re not talking about the imminent disappearance of moths, but instead an ongoing, long-term decline across many species.”

The fate of certain moths is bleak. In the 1960s, golden plusia – a moth with wings of glistering bullion – was considered Britain’s most successful recent colonist, thanks to its taste for garden delphiniums.

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Its fortunes soon nosedived. Among larger moths that have avoided extinction, none has suffered a steeper crash: a 58 per cent decline in abundance across an average ten-year period. Another formerly common species – its familiarity implicit in the name – runs it close: garden dart has declined by 54 per cent over a typical decade.

Beneath the scary headlines, however, the report paints a more complex picture. For a start, one in ten larger moths is bucking the overall trend by becoming commoner: least

carpet numbers, for example, have leapt by 131 per cent per decade. Britain’s moth diversity is also increasing. Although 51 species have gone extinct here since 1900, some 137 have colonised, comprising both natural arrivals, such as dusky hook-tip, and non-natives surreptitiously hitchhiking on plant imports. Yet more, such as clifden nonpareil, have recolonised or – like speckled footman – been rediscovered when feared extinct.

North-south divide

Chemical pollution in southern Britian may explain that region’s notably sharp drop in moths.

Geographical variation is also evident, with moth abundance in southern Britain having dropped by 39 per cent – almost double the north’s decrease. Curiously, this downswing is not mirrored by contractions in moths’ distribution. Indeed, slightly more moths have ranges that are spreading (37 per cent) than shrinking (32 per cent).

Moreover, the northern limit of the range of an average moth from southern Britain July 2021

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Emperor moth pair & five spot burnet moth: Alamy; least carpet moth: Getty; b ack-ve ned moth: Guy Edwardes/naturep .com

Clockwise from left: emperor moths (note the feathered antennae of the male on the left); five-spot burnet moths visit a range of flowers and can be seen in the sunshine; the black-veined

moth was only ever found in southern England but now exists at just a few sites in Kent; the least carpet moth is restricted to the south-east of England, with occasional migrants.

draws attention to some Dutch research, is shifting northwards by 5km per year. which suggests that treating plants with There are also notable differences between fertilisers increased caterpillar mortality habitats: whereas moths breeding in woods in common moths such as straw dot. “But or grasslands are bearing up, moorland even a moth living on a remote Scottish denizens are suffering markedly. mountain is affected by human-induced Explaining these trends is a work in environmental change.” progress. “We don’t yet fully understand The effects of climate change are more what is driving declines,” Richard admits. nuanced. Although enabling southern Fundamentally though, people are to moths to spread north and European blame, he clarifies: “The main problems species to colonise, rising temperatures also are detrimental impacts of agricultural push cold-adapted northern and upland and other landscape changes, species further north or uphill. chemical pollution, urbanisation Scarce silver Y is a moorland and commercial forestry.” moth favouring north and west Chemical pollution is most severe Britain; its abundance has shrunk in southern Britain, the seat of by 69 per cent in 50 years intensive agriculture, and its distribution which may explain BAT BAFFLE by 71 per that region’s Moths and predatory bats are engaged in an cent over notably evolutionary arms race so fraught that some 27 years. sharp drop moths have even evolved sound-absorbing scales Climate in moth on their wings – thereby jamming change may numbers. Richard bats’ echolocatory sonar.

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partly explain why moorland moths are suffering disproportionately, Richard suggests. Other conceivable explanations are unhelpful habitat management or increased levels of nitrogen deposited via rainfall due to vehicle emissions: nitrogen boosts generalist plants to the detriment of ‘weaker’ species on which particular moth caterpillars depend.

Illuminating research The jury is out on the impact of another major countryside change: light pollution.

Given that moths are predominantly creatures of the night, PhD researcher Douglas Boyes is investigating whether artificial light might affect moth populations to levels comparable with habitat loss or climate change. There is certainly robust evidence, he explains, that unnatural light exerts diverse effects across most life stages of moths, including changing key behaviours – from feeding to mating.

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IN NUMBERS Although we are more familiar with butterflies, Britain has more than 40 times as many different types of moth as it does butterflies, and about four times more day-flying species than butterflies.

The cumulative effect of such shifts, however, is hard to gauge. Whereas the entirety of Britain is influenced by climate change and “virtually all of it is modified by some form of land-use change,” Douglas explains, a much smaller percentage of the landscape is directly affected by light pollution. “Light could be an important driver of local changes to moth populations,” he concludes, “but whether it is enough to be a major driver of national declines is less clear.”

Moth conceptions From the general public’s perspective, downturns in moth fortunes might actually be celebrated rather than lamented. From disparaging references in the Bible onwards, moths have generally been unloved. For centuries, people have regarded moths as malign beings haunting dark nights. A 2019 YouGov poll found that three-quarters of people think negatively of moths. One-sixth regard moths as ugly; one in eight even fear them. Such unfavourable attitudes seem fomented by an underlying perception that moths inconvenience our lives: two-thirds of respondents associated moths with eating clothes and one-third with being pests.

There is a smidgeon of truth in this. The Royal Horticultural Society deems topiarydestroying box-tree moth caterpillars to be among the top three pests desecrating British gardens. A Hampshire school banned children from part of its playground because it harboured brown-tail moth caterpillars: in one councillor’s words, “terrifying webs crawling with ugly bugs”.

Two species of clothes moth can render garments unwearable.

But only two. Butterfly Conservation argues that it is irrational for the odd

A 2019 YouGov poll found threequarters of people think negatively of moths.

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troublesome moth to colour opinion on all of Britain’s 2,500 species. After all, if a single school pupil does something naughty, teachers don’t place the whole school in detention.

Such disdain towards moths is even odder given what Douglas calls “the unhelpful, unfortunate and arbitrary division” we make between them and butterflies, which are universally loved. Evolutionarily, the creatures are the same – scale-winged insects in the order Lepidoptera. Indeed, moths are the dominant partners: the paltry handful of butterfly families nestle amidst 120-ish moth families. Perhaps ecological quirks explain the disparity in attitude. “We associate butterflies with lovely sunny days,” Richard suggests, “but most moths fly at night, when we retain a deeprooted sense of unease.”

Pollinating power Perceptions towards moths matter because, well, moths matter. Richard lauds moths’ intrinsic value (“fantastic, fascinating, beautiful creatures”), but particularly champions “their vital roles in our ecosystems”.

Scientists have only recently grasped the importance of moths for pollinating wild plants and agricultural crops. Studies in three British agricultural landscapes revealed that up to 45 per cent of moths were transporting pollen. One researcher involved, Richard Walton from University College London, concluded that “nocturnal moths complement daytime pollinators [like bees], helping keep plant populations diverse and abundant”. In a dangerous irony, by applying pesticides and fertilisers, farmers risk killing off the very creatures they need to propagate crops.

“Our study highlights an urgent need for moths to be included in future agricultural management and conservation strategies,” he concludes.

Moths are also pivotal in food chains, notably through adults provisioning bats and caterpillars nourishing birds. Remove them and moth-munchers suffer: declines of farmland bats and cuckoos have been correlated with dwindling moth numbers.

Clockwise from above: the scarce silver Y moth is darker than the silver Y, and if you look closely has a broken Y-shaped mark on the forewing; the speckled footman

moth is confined to heathland areas of southern Dorset, with a continental subspecies sometimes popping over the Channel; the poplar hawkmoth has a wingspan of 6.5-9cm.

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Speckled Footman: James Lowen; silver y moth: Gianpiero Ferrari/FLPA/ Minden; Poplar hawk-moth: Getty; mothing: Roger Parkes/Alamy

‘Mothing’ made simple For creatures whose very existence tends to pass us by, it is actually pleasingly easy to see moths. More than 200 British species fly by day, so you can start by looking for them along hedgerows or in meadows, rather as you would common butterflies. By night, you can harness the yearning that some moths harbour for a glucose fix by dissolving brown sugar, molasses or treacle into simmering beer or wine, then soaking ropes with the seductivesmelling concoction. The usual way to see night-active moths, however, is to harness their rather mysterious attraction to

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light. A simple approach involves shining a lamp or torch at a white sheet slung over a washing line. Alternatively, you can run a harmless moth ‘trap’, which is essentially a suitable lightbulb sitting above a container filled with egg boxes on which moths can rest. If you fancy a modest DIY challenge, you can build your own trap cheaply (Field Studies Council has advice: tinyurl.com/ FSC-moth). You can make things easier by buying in ready-made electrics – or save yourself the trouble by purchasing a prebuilt trap from retailer Anglian Lepidopterist Supplies (angleps. com; from £135).

Seeing moths is easy – all you need is a torch and a sheet.

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Clockwise from above: the argentand-sable moth favours coppiced deciduous woodland and boggy moorland across the UK; the delicate, wavy pattern on the

yellow shell moth resembles that of a seashell – hence the name; a hummingbird hawkmoth hovers and sips nectar from a buddleia using its long proboscis.

“Without moths,” Richard Walton judges, “many more animals would be at risk.”

Moths’ value rises yet further as their surprising contributions catch the public eye. Cells harvested from a New World moth, the fall armyworm, have proved critical for producing the Novavax Covid-19 vaccine. Reflection-reducing protuberances in a moth’s eye inspired technology integrated into a new NASA camera capable of producing fine-grain images of astronomical objects. There are even tantalising hints of untapped potential.

Unexpectedly, caterpillars of two British moths can feed on – and thus break down – polyethylene and polypropylene. Might moths hint at a solution to the global plastics problem?

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thanks to a Butterfly Conservation campaign running under the hashtag #MothsMatter.

Covid-19-generated travel constraints have prompted surging interest in garden wildlife, especially moths. In spring 2020, retailers sold out of moth traps – the harmless devices by which moth-lovers attract their quarry. In Devon last year, the number of people submitting observations of moths to the county recorder leapt by nearly three-quarters.

of threatened moths, including blackveined and Fisher’s estuarine moths – yet few residents are aware of their existence.

Using urban moths, a pilot run by Lucia Chmurova engaged hard-to-reach groups, including people with mental health issues and teenagers. “It was exciting and surprisingly easy to change perceptions about moths through first-hand experience,” Lucia recalls. The new project has nationallevel aspirations, Butterfly Conservation’s Steve Wheatley explains. “If successful, the interest and value of moths will Changing minds be enhanced across the country, In April 2021, Butterfly hopefully opening doors for more Conservation launched a threeprojects elsewhere.” year initiative, Kent’s Magnificent The organisation already Moths, that combines has an impressive conservation with MOIST MOTH portfolio of education.

Although the caterpillars of almost all moths are moth-saving Kent is home landlubbers, those of china-marks live happily projects. to Britain’s underwater. Even more bizarre, adult sandhill In Dorset, greatest rustic, a coastal species in Britain, Gloucestershire concentration can readily swim underwater.

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CALLING GARDENERS! Gardens are important places for moths and hundreds of species may be living in your neighbourhood. Why not cultivate their favourite foodplants?

5 plants for adult moths To make the most of the sweet, night fragrance of COMMON JASMINE, ideally plant it in a warm, sunny and sheltered spot. It will, however, cope with partial shade if in free-draining soil.

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The caterpillars of purple thorn and (as its name suggests) scalloped hazel both love HAZEL, which can transform rapidly from a single twig into an impressive hedge.

The yellow, scented flowers of COMMON EVENING PRIMROSE open on summer and autumn evenings. Sow in sunny borders with relatively poor soil during early summer.

FUCHSIAS, much favoured by elephant hawkmoth caterpillars, are best grown in a sheltered spot to avoid the delicate, drooping flowers being blown off by the wind.

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HONEYSUCKLES are best known as climbers but also make good hedge substitutes. A popular variety is Lonicera periclymenum, which is best cut back after it flowers.

Being robust and hardy, GARDEN PRIVET is another common hedging plant that offers shelter and privacy for people – and a home for one of Britain’s largest and most spectacular moths, privet hawkmoth.

Along with several common butterflies, migrant hummingbird hawkmoths particularly love BUDDLEIA, hovering like their avian namesake while extending a long, tongue-like proboscis to reach the nectar within.

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The varied coronet has more than doubled its range since 1980 thanks to gardeners’ predilection for growing SWEET WILLIAM. Sow seeds in July to enjoy the pink, red, white and purple flowers the following summer – and then the moths!

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FIND OUT MORE Read the Royal Horticultural Society’s advice on gardening for moths: bit.ly/3g15w3K. Enjoy a wealth of information on how to identify, record and help Britain's moths from Butterfly Conservation: butterfly-conservation.org.

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Yellow shell moth: Sander Meertins/Alamy; Argent and sable moth: David Whitaker/Alamy; Buddleia moth: Hugh Clark/FLPA/Minden; Adults 1-5: Barry Mason/Alamy; A amy; Em o Ereza/A amy; Hugh C ark/FLPA/M nden; Caterp ar 1-5: A amy; M ck Rock/A amy; Andrew Newman/A amy; Andy Sands/NPL; V ad s av Nos ck/A amy

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Sow SWEET ROCKET in late spring and deadhead blooms to extend their flowering season.

Allowing flowers to go to seed should help the plant spread around your garden.

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JAMES LOWEN is an author and naturalist. His latest book, Much Ado About Mothing, is a travel narrative about Britain’s rare and remarkable moths.

Best grown in moist but well-drained soil with a fairly sunny aspect, MINT not only provides a versatile herb but also nourishes the caterpillars of mint moth and plume.

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and Wiltshire, it is planting new habitat to connect Britain’s dozen remaining colonies of barberry carpet. In East Anglia, it is striving to save marsh carpet, which now ranks among Britain’s most pressing moth conservation priorities. In Argyll, Butterfly Conservation Scotland is helping New Forest burnet at the moth’s sole UK location by fencing out the sheep eating its habitat.

Even if nobody envisages the return of moth snowstorms, it is such initiatives, coupled with the world’s richest moth dataset, that stiffen Richard Fox’s resolve.

“It’s an enormous challenge to move from intensive farming and the climate crisis to landscapes where wildlife is thriving. But as a conservationist, you’ve got to stay reasonably optimistic.”

5 plants for caterpillars

Do Not Disturb With overseas holidays largely off the cards, Britain is bracing itself for a season of ‘staycations’. But what does this mean for our local wildlife?

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ue Sayer is founder and director of Cornwall Seal Group Research Trust. Her passion for seals began more than 20 years ago, when she answered an advert in the local paper for somebody to help on a monitoring project. That day, Sayer learned something that was to change her life: that every seal has got a unique fur pattern.

“As soon as I knew that, I could start answering questions,” she says. Was that three seals she was watching in the bay? Or the same one bobbing up three times? Sayer initially thought her own seal colony consisted of about 30 individuals. She now estimates more than 800 pass through.

The intervening 20 years has taught Sayer many things about seals – not least just how sensitive they are to human disturbance.

By Andrew Griffiths

Ash ey Cooper/A amy

Holiday hordes Recent research conducted by the trust has shown that at sites around St Ives, seals were disturbed an astonishing 14 times per hour.

Perhaps most worrying of all, a major cause of these disturbances (40 per cent across all sites) was commercial wildlife tour boats.

This is the essential conundrum of wildlife tourism – the very real danger that we might destroy the very thing we have come to see.

Given the chaotic scenes in the UK countryside last year, when lockdown restrictions were eased, many who work with wildlife are bracing themselves for a similar onslaught during this ‘staycation summer’, caused by restrictions on overseas holidays.

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It is tempting to want to get a closer look at coastal wildlife, but when is it too close for comfort?

Seals can be easily stressed by human disturbance.

July 2021

WATCHING WILDLIFE

July 2021

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Using a scope allows Sue (front) to observe seals safely without disturbing them.

How to photograph seals Sue Sayer of the Cornwall Seal Group Research Trust is “trying to change the culture of photographing seals one photo at time”. Many would consider the ideal holiday snap of a seal as having the animal “on the same level, looking straight at you”. But this apparently perfect photo is so imperfect in so many ways.

“It is counterintuitive to how many of us understand what makes a good photograph, but if a seal is looking directly at you, then it has already been

Sayer and the Cornwall Seal Group Research Trust have prepared by instigating a £75,000 project funded by the Green Recovery Challenge Fund to show people how to behave around seals. In short, how to watch seals well, though the lessons it contains are applicable to all wildlife.

She describes a typical holiday encounter at a ‘haul-out beach’ – a beach beneath a cliff where seals come out of the sea to rest.

“The children rush to the top of the cliff and they turn round and scream at their parents: ‘It’s a seal! It’s a seal!’” says Sayer.

“And the seals stampede into the sea. It is enthusiasm and joy and pleasure – but it is having a really negative effect.”

“If it is not walkers and runners on the beaches, it is day-tripping boats, kayakers or wild swimmers.”

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disturbed and is at least preparing for a ‘flight’ response,” she explains. “If this level of disturbance is continual, then the long-term effects of elevated stress levels can be serious.“ Instead, Sayer asks that people keep their distance and use a longer lens – even most smartphone cameras have good zoom functions now – and don’t seek eye contact.“Showing natural behaviour is better than showing a seal spooked and looking at your camera,” she says.

The time a seal spends on land is important for its recuperation. It is replenishing oxygen and digesting food.

This is particularly important for pregnant females, who must lay down sufficient fat to feed her pups for three weeks – a period during which she fasts. Constant disturbance interrupts this process and results in underweight pups who themselves do not have the resources to survive. So we see the charming sight of a seal slipping back into the sea, but cumulatively we may unwittingly be doing more damage than we could possibly imagine.

“If a pregnant female in the summer is disturbed, it can deliver an underweight pup in the autumn, which dies in the winter,” says Sayer. “That’s it in a nutshell.”

The shoreline habitat is crucial for the seal, that edge between land and sea, and as such it is subjected to human disturbance from all sides: if it is not walkers and runners on the beaches, it is day-tripping boats, kayakers or wild swimmers coming at them from the sea.

“Most of the disturbance is unintentional, and most of it is accidental contact,” says Sayer. “We are out doing other stuff and we happen upon wildlife.” But accidental disturbance of wildlife is still disturbance.

Perfect storm My first appointment to speak to Alice Skehel, Little Tern Project officer for east Norfolk, had to be cancelled when a storm that blew in over the Easter weekend swept away the rope fences installed on the beach only a week before.

The ropes fence off the beach to protect the nesting colonies of little terns. Known as sea swallows, these small, elegant, swooping birds are one of the UK’s rarest seabirds and their numbers have declined a further 18 per cent already this century.

“So we had to get the quad bike down there and drag the rope back out of the ocean,” says Skehel cheerfully, when I do get to speak to her.

Norfolk’s little terns began to arrive from West Africa for their July 2021

WATCHING WILDLIFE

Spot the signs: disturbed seals O If a seal is looking directly at you, on land or in the water, it is aware of your presence. Its fight or flight response has been activated. Remain quiet and back off to avoid it moving away.

O If a seal is moving from its resting place, it has been spooked, its stress levels have increased, its rest has been disrupted and its energy wasted. Move away slowly and quietly.

O If a seal is making for the water, it is fleeing. Stampeding seals are likely to be injured. Move away immediately.

C ockw e from top eft: N ck Upton/naturep .com; S mon Dack/A amy; Kev n S mmonds/SuperStock/A amy; Ash ey Cooper/A amy

A typical ‘haul-out beach’, where seals come ashore to rest, moult and breed. If disturbed, these grey seals may stampede into the sea, wasting precious energy.

breeding season just ahead of that storm.

The increasing volatility of the weather (due to climate change), predation and human disturbance are the three main threats to the terns’ survival, sometimes in not so easily predictable ways. When I spoke to Skehel, she was concerned that the storm had deposited too much sand on the shingle beach, which may impact on the shallow scrapes the birds make for their nests. All these factors can affect the birds’ long-term survival chances.

“We do things like clutch counts, and you know what kind of year it has been for them, wherever they have been, because if there are not many fish, or if the weather is bad, or if they have had a [difficult] migration, they will lay on average fewer eggs,” says Skehel. “They normally lay two to three eggs, but if things aren’t going very well their average clutch size will be lower.”

Of those three big threats, human disturbance is the one most within our immediate means to control. There is a phenomenon that ecologists refer to as the ‘edge effect’, where life seems to favour the zone between one habitat and another.

Humans, too, are susceptible to this attraction, as anyone who has put up a fence will know.

July 2021

O A big ‘crash dive‘ shows a seal is distressed. If you come across one at sea, stay calm and keep moving.

O Stay out of sight. Seals in the sea close to shore may want to haul out.

Find out more: sealalliance.org

Little Terns migrate to nest on our sand and shingle beaches from April to August.

During peak season, a balance needs to be struck between meeting the needs of people and wildlife in our parks and reserves.

Slow down for snakes Owain Masters, public engagement and education officer for the Amphibian and Reptile Conservation Trust (ARC) puts it well: “Nature reserves are managed for wildlife, they are not managed for recreation. That is key – people realising that they are not parks, they are for wildlife.”

ARC manages more than 80 reserves in the UK, which makes it one of our leading managers of lowland, dry heathland, the 70

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typical habitat favoured by our native reptiles. On dry heathland, fire is the number one risk from visitor pressure.

Two of our reptile species – the smooth snake and the sand lizard – are so protected that it is illegal to go purposefully looking for them. Other species though, if you are in the right habitat, are probably more abundant than you realise, they are just so sensitive to human presence that you don’t get to see them.

“I’ve got a bit of a knack for it now because I lead some guided walks and it does require a slowing down beyond the slowing down you would need to see [ for instance] the bird life,” says Masters.

The best tactic is a passive one: find the right habitat, sit, wait, and watch through binoculars. from a distance.

Masters is aware of the thrill of seeing a snake in the wild, but again is keen to avoid disturbance by dissuading people from actively going out and looking for them.

Besides, the best tactic seems to be a passive one: find the right habitat (the edge between cover and open space is best), sit, wait, and watch through binoculars from a distance. Reptiles embody the very spirit of a fleeting wildness, and you will need to tap into that rhythm if you are going to have any chance of seeing them at all.

Haweswater honeypot In the post-lockdown summer of 2020, Lake District visitor numbers were so great and their behaviour such that one local authority had to call on emergency powers and close a road by Coniston Water to protect its residents from further distress. Yet 60km or so north, walkers and backpackers come to enjoy some of the wildest and most desolate landscape England has to offer.

The Haweswater catchment is owned

by United Utilities and managed as a nature reserve by the RSPB. This is ‘Wild Haweswater’, the centre point of which is the 6km crescent reservoir surrounded by fells and bordered by woodland.

July 2021

Hiking: A amy; h de: W d Intr gue; zard: Ross Hodd nott/NPL

Like most who work with wildlife, Skehel is torn: between wanting to share her love for it, but wanting to give it the space it needs to thrive. She appreciates the wonder people feel of walking along a beach and suddenly seeing hundreds of little terns taking to the air, and reaching for their phones to record it.

But she also describes the quiet dread she feels when she has watched a bird nest just outside the roped fence, then sees people stride right up to it the next day. If a nest fails, the chances are the bird will not return.

“It’s hard because it is a rope fence, so it is almost like it is guiding someone and you want to walk up to it, but the best thing to do is to stay away,” says Skehel.

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4 wildlife hides for photography If you want to photograph wildlife without disturbing it, try renting a photo hide. Here are four to get you started: 1 WOODLAND WILDLIFE HIDE Cumbria Wild Intrigue’s new hide at RSPB Haweswater is great for nuthatches, great spotted woodpeckers and red squirrels. From £80. wildhaweswater.co.uk

2 BUZZARD HIDE Derbyshire Also visited by red kites, ravens and foxes. Open October to April. From £100. peaknature.co.uk

3 KESTREL HIDE Yorkshire Overlooks a breeding pair in a meadow. Open all year; best in late spring and summer when the adults are feeding the chicks. From £80. lesgibbonphotography.com

4 HORN MILL OSPREY HIDE Rutland Located on a working fish farm and open from April to August. From £80. rivergwashtroutfarm.co.uk

O For more wildlife hides, see our guide at discoverwildlife.com/wildlife-hides-uk

Sand lizards only occur in a handful of protected heathland and dune sites across the UK and require undisturbed sand to lay their eggs in.

Hides – here at RSPB Haweswater – are well equipped for photographers.

In part to cope with visitor pressure, nature reserves are increasingly trying to ‘manage’ the visitor experience. Haweswater is home to rare, alpine plants growing in fragile habitat on the crags of the fell. In an innovative experiment, some of the plants have been transplanted to a fenced-off area that keeps grazing animals out and allows visitors to appreciate these plants without damaging the landscape.

There are ‘honeypots within honeypots’ and at Haweswater visitors tend to July 2021

trying to do it in such a way as to teach people how to be responsible in nature.”

They are “trying to encourage sustainable, responsible wildlife tourism – ecotourism in its truest sense,” she says.

Talking to Devey about her hides, I am reminded of glamping. It might raise the eyebrow of the weathered solo backpacker out for a night in the fells equipped with no more than a bivvy bag, but Devey is trying to engage a different audience. While, as a dedicated naturalist herself, she may

not mind sitting beside a badger sett and putting up with the attentions of biting midges, she understands that may not be everybody’s cup of tea. Some people might prefer – well – a cup of tea.

“By providing comfortable chairs, and windows you can watch [the wildlife] through, and tea and coffee... it is a funny thing, but it is as though people are spending a night out, they see it as an alternative to going to the cinema or for a meal. It’s an entertaining thing to do,” says Devey. “We try and create that kind of experience for them, a bit more plush, so we can get these new audiences. Otherwise, if these people don’t have a connection with nature then they won’t learn about it and they won’t protect it,” she says.

Whether we like to view our wildlife through mirror windows or the rolled-back flap of a solo backpacking tent, it would be good if we could all make one simple pledge this summer: to give our natural world the space it needs to breathe, and to watch wildlife well.

ANDREW GRIFFITHS writes about conservation, the environment, and all things wild and free.

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TIGER WOODS Follow a raptor monitor as she delves deep into the forests of Shropshire in search of a rare but particularly magnificent bird of prey: the goshawk.

Chris O’Reilly/naturepl.com (controlled conditions)

By Katie Lloyd

The goshawk is a most formidable hunter and a fierce-looking bird.

Their broad wings allow them to hunt at speed, crashing to the forest floor and even pursuing prey on foot.

GOSHAWKS

t is late June and one of the hottest days of the year so far, but I’m wearing long sleeves, trousers and sturdy boots – clothing designed for biting insects and overgrown vegetation. My thighs burn from battling through the hip-high bramble which has, in the past couple of months, evidently flourished along the edges and rides of the woodland I’m standing in. Ahead of me, two juvenile treecreepers inch their way up the furrowed bark of a Douglas fir.

Further up that same tree is a dark, straggly mass: a goshawk nest.

I’m in Shropshire, a hotspot for this magnificent raptor. This goshawk site is just one of 50 – and counting – regularly occupied territories that the Shropshire Raptor Study Group visits each year.

Founded in 2010, the group surveys the local birds of prey and runs a colour-ringing programme to identify individuals from specific nests. As one of the 12-strong team, I help to monitor nests in my corner of the county. The data we gather, combined with that of other raptor groups across Britain, is allowing us to understand the status and ecology of these birds, and informing how they can be best managed.

The nest is adorned with green branches of spruce: a good sign. This ‘decorating’

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Goshawks’ abodes are anything from 10 25 metres high so getting a decent view is not easy. tends to happen during nest building, but also during chick rearing. And there’s another positive clue – a white halo of down and a splash that coats the edge of the nest, spilling onto the tree trunk and the forest floor beneath – a sure indication

that an explosion of life has occurred here.

The small wisps of fluff are the moulted down of the young chicks as their ‘pin’ (immature) feathers grow; the splash is their faecal droppings, launched from the nest in an attempt to keep a clean home.

The young ones I stand some distance away from the tree in order to get a decent view into the nest.

Considering goshawks’ abodes are normally at least two thirds up a tree – at anything from 10-25 metres high – it’s not easy. But at this time of year, it is slightly easier, as the goshawk chicks should be big enough to spot or may even have fledged to a nearby branch.

GOSHAWKS

A protected species

Th s page: Kat e L oyd (x3); oppos te: Dav d Chapman/A amy

The goshawk is listed under Schedule 1 of the Wildlife and Countryside Act, which protects it against disturbance while nesting and rearing young. All raptor group members must carry out monitoring under a Schedule 1 licence, issued by the BTO. Though the licence permits potential disturbance for the purposes of ringing and nest recording, most survey work is done from the ground, keeping disturbance to a minimum. Due to the vulnerability of the species and the remaining threat of persecution, nest sites are recorded in strict confidentiality.

Straightaway, I spy a pair of pale grey eyes. They lack the intensity of an adult’s orange glare, and are set in a slender, teetering head that still bears small tufts of down around the eyes and bill. The bird is tall, but stooped and a little scruffy – it still has some way to go to become the impressive adult it will be.

The nest is just under one metre in diameter and about 25cm deep; on the large side, even by goshawk standards. The substantial splash suggests that more than one chick has been reared here. I scan the surrounding branches for fledglings, but they’re empty. I circle the nest from below, clambering over fallen conifers and mossy tree stumps, stopping periodically to peer up through my binoculars.

From an up-slope position I catch sight of the fuzzy top of another head. A nearby buzzard pierces the stillness with a highpitched call and the head of this second chick momentarily bobs up and then tucks back down, out of view. It is lying flat, and is probably smaller and downier than the other chick. Clutch size is usually three to four July 2021

Clockwise from left: when up close you can admire the goshawk’s flaming orange eyes and beautiful barred chest plumage; look for the raptor in dense areas of forests – particularly coniferous ones; goshawk nests are large and often located close to the trunk of a tree; gaining perspective is vital when searching for nests and chicks – stand back and look up.

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Winter watchout Raptor monitoring is not restricted to hot summer days; goshawk surveying can be a year-round activity. It often starts on bright, cold winter days, and I have occasionally found myself trudging up a snow-swept hillside to gain views over a large woodland in the hope, or anticipation, of seeing displaying goshawks.

Like most raptors, goshawks make the most of clear skies and rising thermals by performing aerial acrobatics above woodlands in a bid to reinforce mating partnerships. The display involves slow and exaggerated wing-flapping with an occasional series of spectacular ‘switchbacks’. This is when the birds dive steeply, wings-closed, before sharply 76

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shooting upwards. If you’re ever lucky enough to see a goshawk display, do submit the record to your local raptor group, who will check the woodland for nests.

Female goshawks can be a similar size to buzzards, but individuals sighted in the distance can be distinguished by several features. A goshawk has a more protruding head and longer tail, resulting in its moniker of ‘flying crucifix’. It glides with flat wings, in contrast to buzzards, who fly with wings held in a shallow V-shape.

Because of their much smaller size, male goshawks can be more easily confused with sparrowhawks, but have a more rounded tail, broader wings and a heavier body, which make for a stronger, steadier flight.

Finding nests is no easy task. Goshawks, being secretive forest-dwellers, tend to make their homes deep in undisturbed and

Checking an old goshawk nest, I was met with the curious stare of a greylag goose.

remote areas of large conifer woodlands.

So, my fellow members and I work together when possible, scanning the upper branches while walking in parallel to ensure maximum coverage. Squirrel dreys draw the eye, but the untidy bundles of sticks and leaves quickly give them away. Goshawks nests are much larger, comprising layered twigs and sometimes fresh sprigs of growth, but never leaves.

Meet the neighbours Buzzard nests are very similar to those of goshawks, and much more common. When monitoring sites, second or third visits usually confirm which species we are dealing with. However, I have observed goshawks building a nest early in the season, only for a pair of buzzards to move in and take over before the egg-laying stage. The evictees must construct a new nest, or give up the breeding attempt until next year. To confuse things further, buzzards and goshawks can be quite tolerant neighbours, and I have recorded both nesting within 100m of each other. Once, I had the bizarre experience of checking an old goshawk nest, only to be met with the curious stare of a greylag goose. It obviously liked the idea of a nest with a view.

Because of storms and unwanted interlopers, goshawks quite often utilise July 2021

Illustration: Getty; flying: Paul Miguel/FLPA/Minden; nest: Andy Sands/NPL; ringing: Ann&Steve Toon/Alamy; tree canopy: Chris Strickland/Alamy

eggs, all laid at intervals of between two and three days, so there is potential for a small age difference between siblings, especially if only the youngest and oldest survive.

Additionally, a male is considerably smaller than a female. These two youngsters are about 25 days old. They will be venturing out of the nest onto adjacent branches in a week or so, and taking their first flight in two or more. I decide to make my final visit within the next ten days, to check that they have both successfully fledged.

GOSHAWKS

Back from the brink

Clockwise from above: young stay in the nest for about three months before venturing onto nearby branches; a goshawk chick is ringed; raptor monitors need a head for heights; the highspeed predator can chase down corvids and rabbits.

The goshawk is a vulnerable species with a turbulent history.

It has featured in falconry since the Middle Ages, when it was widespread, and when native woodland was extensive. Since then, the population has suffered the impacts of both the collection of young birds and eggs, and the rapid felling of forests. Replaced by guns in game hunting in the 16th century, the bird went from accomplice to rival and was targeted by gamekeepers to reduce impacts on gamebird populations. Due to this relentless persecution, the bird was driven to extinction in Britain by the end of the 19th century. However, the goshawk continued to be popular in falconry, and from the 1960s a combination of accidental escapes and intentional releases paved the way to a reintroduction in Britain.

Though persecution continues, the population has gradually increased, with the latest data estimating 622 pairs in Britain.

Goshawks were favoured by medieval falconers.

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Goshawks can be seen in winter too. This is the time of year when they perform their impressive ‘sky dances’ high over the trees to attract a mate.

GOSHAWKS SPOT THE DIFFERENCE Top tips on how to tell these three similar-looking raptors apart when in flight.

Forest feasts BUZZARD Finger-like wing ends and wedgeshaped tail. Flies with wings in a shallow V-shape.

V KESTREL Smaller with a distinctive hovering flight, pointed wings and a long tail.

V GOSHAWK

Described as the ‘tiger of the woodland’ for its status as the ultimate forest-dwelling predator, the goshawk can fly at speeds of up to 40km/h when hunting. The male brings the majority of the food to the nest and can range far from his territory on hunting expeditions, covering a diversity of habitats and consequently providing varied meals – though wood pigeons and squirrels are the most regular offerings. Evidence of feeding behaviour, such as plucked feathers and fur, as well as carcasses on the woodland floor or tree stumps, is often visible in goshawk territories.

The remains of a hard-won dinner at – a good sign th e. os cl goshawks are

Portra t: Peter Ca rns/naturep .com; ustrat ons: De Agost n /Getty; rema ns: Kat e L oyd

Can be a similar size to a buzzard but with a more protruding head and longer tail.

Flies with flat wings.

more than one nest in their territory. It is not uncommon for a pair to build and use a new nest when they already have one that has served them perfectly well for the past few years. More often than not it’s an insurance plan, but having two nests offers the luxury of choice, with the selected nest often interchanging each year. Most of the building work is done by the female in late winter or early spring – though the process can be started in the autumn – with the bird either building a whole new home or adding to an existing one. Early winter is a good time to find nests in new territories and locate old ones, particularly in deciduous larch stands where the leafless branches offer better views.

During the nest-building period and ensuing copulation, goshawks can be at their most vocal. The dense canopies of conifer plantations frequently echo with the deep ‘kya-kya-kya’ call from birds that

I hope to hear the chicks’ energetic vocalisations as they fly about their neighbourhood.

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usually remain unseen. Whatever is observed or heard (or not, as may be the case) during that first visit, a second is made to check if eggs have been laid. From the ground, this takes fieldcraft, patience and a good eye, as well as the ability to endure a dose of neck strain. At some nests it may be possible to see the female’s tail feather jutting out – if she is sitting on the nest, she’s incubating. For new, less dense nests, it may be possible to stand under the tree and look up through the base for a bird-shaped silhouette. Otherwise, I’m looking for sudden movements. Once, observing a nest, I couldn’t see any signs of occupancy, then was lucky enough to catch the fleeting moment when the resident female briefly stretched her wing. If you do happen to stumble upon a large nest at the right time of year, don’t spend too much time in the vicinity – stick to the footpaths and stay as quiet as possible.

When I make my fourth and final visit to check again on my two new chicks, I hope to hear their energetic vocalisations as they fly about their woodland neighbourhood, finding their feet – or wings – in the world.

Each recorded breeding attempt enables us to gain a truer picture of the distribution, population size and status of this reestablishing species. Every successful nest is a small step towards the goshawk being back for good. I’m optimistic that, with the Shropshire Raptor Study Group, I will be battling the bramble at new and additional nesting territories for summers to come, monitoring the ever-expanding population of this iconic bird.

Summer successes It often takes several visits through winter and early spring to confirm that nesting is taking place – and by goshawks. If all the signs are positive, we don’t visit the nests again until June and July, when brood size and fledging success are estimated. This is also a good time to find new territories – nearby fledglings are often too noisy to miss.

KATIE LLOYD is a conservation biologist currently working for Natural England. She has been monitoring goshawks for the past six years.

FIND OUT MORE Read about the monitoring work of the Shropshire Raptor Study Group at shropshirebirds.co.uk.

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S More than 20 family units

have been identified in Dominica’s waters, mostly groups of related females with dependent calves. T

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Behind the image

Hanging out with the pod

by FRANCO BANFI

2015

Franco undertook a breathless dive to photograph a pod of snoozing sperm whales in the Caribbean waters off Dominica.

FRANCO BANFI is an award-winning Swiss wildlife photographer and tour leader who has been shooting the underwater world for over three decades. banfi.ch

ectic day? Perhaps you need a power nap to recharge your batteries – and the planet’s largest toothed predator is no different. Photographer Franco Banfi encountered this group of sperm whales enjoying a brief doze in the warm waters off Dominica, hanging vertically some 15m below the sunlit surface.

“Sperm whales nap for just 10 or 15 minutes, often several times each day,” observes Franco. As this mesmerising image shows, it’s a communal affair: the whale on the far left arrived to join the slumber party, whose members remained motionless while another freediver photographed them.

The social structure of the sperm whale, which has the largest brain of any creature, is complex and fascinating. More than 20 family units have been identified in Dominica’s waters, mostly groups of related females with dependent calves. During brief group snoozes, adults typically surround the young to protect them.

The whales communicate using bursts of loud clicks known as ‘codas’ in dialects that seem to be shared by family groups and across larger ‘clans’.

H

Hold your breath…

Peaceful as the scene appears, capturing such an image can be challenging.

“A limited number of permits for photographing sperm whales are issued by the Dominican authorities,” explains Franco. “These allow swimming and snorkelling only – so I had to hold my breath and freedive to capture the shot.

This kind of photography can be tiring, even frustrating if the whales swim too deep for me to follow.”

This powerful predator hunts for giant squid, its preferred prey, at depths of over 1km, staying down for perhaps 90 minutes – with a nap between sorties, of course. Paul Bloomfield July 2021

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This month’s panel

ST UA RT B L AC K M A N

E L L E N H U SA I N

L AU R I E J AC K S O N

RICHARD JONES

DAV I D L I N D O

H E L E N P I LC H E R

K AT E R I S E LY

H E L E N S CA L E S

Science writer

Wildlife film-maker

Wildlife tour leader

Entomologist

Birding expert

Science writer

Ornithologist

Marine biologist

&A

We solve your wildlife mysteries.

Email your questions to wildquestions@immediate.co.uk More amazing facts at discoverwildlife.com

BIOLOGY

Can a kangaroo walk backwards? es and no. Ground-dwelling kangaroos have a specialised ‘pentapedal’ locomotion, in which the tail acts like an extra leg providing forward propulsion, and the two hind legs move in unison as a hop (rather than in sequence, as when walking).

The very large hind legs, feet and muscular tail make these animals brilliantly adapted to travelling large distances at speed – a red kangaroo, for instance, can cover 7m in a single bound. They cannot do this in reverse, though sparring males can make smaller hops and shuffles backwards to dodge their opponents or avoid injury.

Tree kangaroos, in contrast, are able to move their shorter, stockier hind limbs independently, and so can reverse down tree trunks with ease. Ancestors of all modern kangaroos were arboreal, but it seems that venturing onto the plains resulted in a giant leap – forward – for kangaroo-kind. Ellen Husain

Y Light-sensitive genitals are a boon to swallowtail butterflies.

BIOLOGY

Do genitals have other uses? es. It may sound freaky, but the Japanese yellow swallowtail butterfly can actually ‘see’ with its genitals.

Twenty years ago, biologist Kentaro Arikawa discovered that the genitals of the male and female adults contain cells that respond to light. These photoreceptive cells aren’t used ‘for’ sex, but they do shed light on the process – literally. Yellow swallowtails mate facing away from each other, so the male uses his light-sensitive organ to help line up with the female. If

Butterfly: Getty; kangaroo: Jam Tarr s/Getty

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the photoreceptors are covered up, mating success decreases.

Females, meanwhile, use their light-sensitive cells to help position their ‘ovipositor’ (egg-laying organ). Pregnant females will lay their eggs on citrus leaves, but if their lightsensitive cells are blacked out, they struggle to detect the leaf surface or attach their eggs.

Similar structures have since been found in other butterfly species, so the phenomenon could be more widespread than initially thought. Helen Pilcher

July 2021

Q&A

There’s no going back.

Red kangaroos can shuffle and hop in reverse a little bit, but they have evolved to move forward at speed, reaching over 55km per hour on the open plains.

July 2021

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Q&A

The phrase refers to the adults, but coot chicks have bald heads too.

MARINE BIOLOGY

Why do some worms look like a pig’s bottom?

Bootylicious and buoyant: the pig’s rump.

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BIRDS

Why do we say ‘bald as a coot’?

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oots are much-loved members of the rail family (made up of small, wading birds) and are often mistaken for ducks. There were once two common phrases involving these birds: ‘queer as a coot’ and ‘bald as a coot’. The former has now vanished from popular parlance and referred to people being odd or strange, as the birds themselves were deemed as being foolish: silly coot.

The phrase ‘bald as a coot’ has been around since 1430 and was made in

reference to people who looked like coots, ie bald at the front of their heads.

But it’s not just to do with lack of hair.

The word ‘bald’ actually derives from the old English word ‘bala’, meaning ‘white patch’, which the bird’s white frontal plate resembles. This distinctive shield stands out against the dark head when held low in displays of aggression.

However, in my view, everyone has overlooked the chicks of coots. Now they really are bald! David Lindo

haetopterus pugaporcinus, the pig’s rump worm, is one of those species whose name perfectly describes its appearance. To see one, you’ll need to dive 800m into the twilight zone where they float around looking – quite frankly – like a pair of pink, peachy pig’s buttocks. These are polychaete worms, relatives of common coastal species like lugworms and ragworms, which generally have bodies divided into segments, each one bearing lots of bristles known as chaete (hence polychaete). In the pig’s rump worm, one segment has enlarged into a jellyfilled bubble that boosts the animal’s buoyancy and helps it float, saving energy in deep waters where there’s little food and oxygen. Helen Scales

Earwigs

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WHAT ARE EARWIG PINCERS USED FOR?

It’s uncertain but the forceps (technically called cerci) may offer a pinch defence — which is not painful, but may startle. Or they could help with the complex origami-fan-style folding of the membranous flight wings. They might also be used in courtship as the male’s are rounded whilst the female’s are narrow.

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HOW DO THEY CARE FOR THEIR YOUNG?

A female earwig stands guard over her clutch of eggs, palpating them with her antennae and periodically licking them.

This seems to offer protection from predators and also prevents the growth of fungi and mould.

She maintains this motherly protection until the nymphs have hatched, helping them exit the egg shells and providing them with food.

Earwigs have large hind pincers. Inset: the females make good mothers.

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DO THEY ENTER EARS?

Old English ear-wicga (ear-wiggler), is similar to perce-oreille (French for ear-piercer), ørentviste (Danish for ear-twister), and ohrwurm (German for ear worm). They crawl into tight spaces behind loose bark, between fence slats and under logs, but there is an oft-told tale of a homeless person reporting to experts that if you have a mind to sleep under a hedge then they might sometimes crawl into your earhole.

July 2021

Coot: Stefan Huwiler/imageBroker/Getty; worm: Karen Osborn; earw g cutout: K m Tay or/naturep .com (capt ve); earw g eggs: T m Shepherd/Getty; blunthead slug snake: Chien Lee/Minden

3 questions on

Q&A

Some snakes with specially adapted jaws make light work of a mouthful of mollusc.

BEHAVIOUR

How do snakes eat snails? nails don’t make the easiest mouthful, but two groups of snakes (from Asia and South America) are particularly adept at consuming these slippery molluscs.

The snakes’ jaws aren’t powerful enough to crush rigid shells, but they have a secret weapon: more teeth on the right side than the left.

This lopsided dentition, combined with the unusual ability to move the sides of their jaws independently, enables them to firmly grip the shell while extracting the soft body.

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July 2021

Many snails have a hard operculum (used to block the shell entrance) that is potentially damaging if swallowed. The bluntheaded snail-eating snake has a novel way of dealing with this. It repositions the freshly extracted snail to one side of its jaw, and uses the other to saw off the appendage in as little as six strokes. The snake does have one nemesis, though: left-spiralling (sinistral) shells are unsuited to their bite and make for a challenging meal. Laurie Jackson

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Q&A BIRDS

Can different bird species understand each other’s calls?

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ot exactly, but they can learn the meanings of unfamiliar calls through ‘translators’. Birds call and sing to communicate with potential mates or rivals within their own species, but don’t automatically understand the vocalisations of others. However, sometimes there’s a good reason to overcome this language barrier, such as ganging up on a predator.

Groups of small birds will often harass a threat, such as a bird of prey, with the aim of bothering it enough that it moves on – but how

do the birds know when someone else wants to join forces?

Research on wood warblers has shown that they don’t instinctively understand when an unfamiliar species is giving the alarm call that ‘a predator is here’, but once they have been part of a mixed mobbing flock, and have associated the unfamiliar calls with the alarm calls of familiar species, they will start to recognise the unknown call as being a predator warning.

Kate Risely

Wood warblers can learn to understand the alarm calls of fellow songbirds.

The Explainer Termites with tell-tale straight antennae aloft.

Inset: a termite soldier (left) and worker (right).

Genetic bottleneck

Just as the neck of a bottle restricts the rate at which wine can be poured, a genetic bottleneck checks the flow of genetic material between generations. The cause is often a sharp reduction in the size of a population, which reduces the gene pool to something more like a gene puddle. Ten thousand years ago, the world’s cheetah population was reduced to just a handful of individuals, which echoes today in the species’ strikingly low genetic diversity.

Theoretically, this means they are less able to adapt to environmental change.

Stuart Blackman

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INSECTS

If termites are not ants, what are they?

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ong known as ‘white ants’, termites also have large colonies with a disposable worker caste to forage, fight and build, and live in highly populous, complex semisubterranean nests, overseen by a fertile, egg-laying queen.

But there are significant differences. In appearance, ants have a slim thorax, a tiny, hinge-like node segment at the waist, a bulbous abdomen and distinctive elbowed antennae. Termites have neither a narrow waist nor kinked antennae, nor do they

have the sting or formic acid possessed of most ants. Most importantly, newly hatched termites are miniature, mobile versions of the adults and immediately join in the nest processes, whereas ants have legless, maggot-like larvae that have to be fed by the workers until they are large enough to pupate for metamorphic transition into an adult. Ants are related to bees and wasps, which also pass through larva and pupa stage before adulthood. Termites are actually social cockroaches. Richard Jones July 2021

Warbler: Andy Rouse/2020VISION/NPL; cheetah: Getty; termites: Chien Lee/Minden/NPL; termite inset: Piotr Naskrecki/Minden; shieldbug eggs: Paul Bertner/Minden/NPL

Near-extinction led to inbreeding among cheetahs.

Q&A

What is it?

SHIELDBUG EGGS If it sometimes feels like emojis are taking over the world, maybe they are. And here, perhaps, are their breeding grounds. Either that, or we are looking at the next generation of moustachioed Belgian detectives. The reality is no less delightful. This is a brood of shieldbug eggs stuck fast to the underside of a leaf. Through their transparent shells, the embryos within are apparently having a good old gander at the world into which they are soon to emerge.

Which, let’s face it, would be enough to put a wide-eyed and slightly bemused expression on anybody’s face. SB

E+OE Prices subject to change. Goods subject to availability

OUR WILD WORLD

At home

Bring a little extra wildlife into your life with the best of this month’s TV, books, podcasts, streaming and much more.

Book choice

Delightful images of an elusive mammal Wildlife photographer Andy Howard reveals the world of otters in his latest book.

THE SECRET LIFE OF THE OTTER

BY ANDY HOWARD, SANDSTONE PRESS, £24.99

Andy Howard must spend a not inconsiderable amount of time smelling of seaweed, judging from the stunning images gathered in this photo book. Most are close-up, long-lens photographs taken while lying prone in the squelchy kelp beds that line the shores of north-west Scotland and its many islands. This ever-changing zone, which Howard calls the “intertidal café”, offers rich pickings for otter and photographer alike.

We see whiskery otters with slicked-back fur devouring octopus, crabs and various fish, including an enormous conger eel. Cubs cavort among the surf, adults battle over territory, families snooze peacefully after feasting. There’s seldom-seen behaviour, too, such as a rare photo of a dog otter wrapped in a mating embrace with a bitch, jaws clamped uncomfortably tight around her neck.

Another image shows a torpedo-like otter surging towards the camera just

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below the surface, with glistening air bubbles rising around it.

Occasional photographs of other coastal megafauna, from white-tailed eagles to harbour seals, add variety to the book. However, a few more landscapes and shots of otter field signs would have helped to put the wildlife and behaviour in context.

Like its predecessors, The Secret Life of the Mountain Hare (2018) and The Secret Life of the Cairngorms (2019), this handsomely produced volume has only sparse captions. But that does at least allow the photographs to do the talking. The beauty of the otter speaks for itself. Above all, this is a book for gifting, perhaps as a souvenir of a trip to the Highlands or as a sly suggestion to a friend or partner that it’s high time one was booked.

Ben Hoare, BBC Wildlife editorial consultant

Turn to p99 for a chance to win The Secret Life of the Otter and The Secret Life of the Cairngorms.

VIEW MORE IMAGES FROM THE BOOK

July 2021

OUR WILD WORLD Andy Howard

An otter cub calls for its mother on the Isle of Mull in the Hebrides, Scotland.

OUR WILD WORLD The song of the humpback whale takes centre stage in Fathom on Apple TV+.

TV

Fathom APPLE TV+, 25 JUNE

WI LD STRE A M TV SERIES Iolo’s Pembrokeshire: The Wild West A guided tour of Pembrokeshire’s stunning scenery and beautiful wildlife.

BBC One Wales, from 5 July DOCUMENTARY Breaking Boundaries: The Science of Our Planet Attenborough’s new programme looks at how humanity’s actions are threatening the planet.

Netflix, streaming now YOUTUBE SERIES Crash Course Zoology Series exploring the world of animals, hosted by wildlife ecologist Dr Rae Wynn-Grant. bit.ly/CrashCourseZoology

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life, with long days tracking sounds produced by humpbacks – not always hearing anything – can help put things into perspective.

Catching the occasional glimpse of a whale or hearing their song gives a real feeling of excitement, but the documentary can seem a little slow at times. If you need a sense of something greater while seeing the work that goes into asking and researching important wildlife questions, then Fathom is one to watch.

Stephanie Organ, Science writer

BOOK

BOOK

Women on Nature

Much Ado About Mothing

EDITED BY KATHARINE NORBURY, UNBOUND, £25.00

In the past, what we might have thought of as nature writing in Britain, Ireland and our archipelago’s islands, has mainly been associated with men. In her introduction to this anthology, Norbury wonders what would happen if she, “coppiced the woodland” allowing light to shine on the other half of the population.

This book encompasses the writing of 119 women, and spans 700 years.

Through forms as diverse as fiction, recipes and poetry, this collection not only helps to illuminate historical and contemporary voices, but also makes you reconsider the meaning of the nature writing genre. You might not enjoy all the pieces equally, but those you love will leave you craving more.

In 2019, Lowen undertook a quest to see the rarest and most remarkable moths in Britain. Travelling across fens and along clifftops, from Cornwall to the Scottish Highlands, he guides us through his year of moths.

This journey introduces the reader to many astonishing species, and along the way we meet a broad range of people that share Lowen’s passion for recording and conserving moths, including his young daughter who is also utterly enchanted by them. In his words: “Moths are just butterflies with bad PR.” This book seeks to rectify that – and is, indeed, rather good PR for moths.

Jane Adams, Nature writer

Ashleigh Whiffin, Entomologist

BY JAMES LOWEN, BLOOMSBURY, £18.99

July 2021

Getty Images

If you have ever dreamed of communicating with animals, then this documentary by Apple TV+ gives an insight into two scientists’ individual quests into the deep with the aim of understanding how and why humpback whales communicate.

Set on opposite sides of the globe, Fathom shows the challenges and emotions involved in fieldwork studying the humpback whales’ complex ‘song’. If you thought lockdown felt lonely, then the researchers’ isolation from ‘normal’

OUR WILD WORLD PRODUCT

Carabus PAPILLON GIN, £38.00 FOR 70CL

Nobody ever said that the life of a naturalist was a bed of roses, but spare a thought for our columnist Nick Baker, who has gone the extra mile in a desperate bid to help the species he loves. Here he has teamed up with the Papillon Distillery on Dartmoor.

Painstakingly blending a gin that features such local foragables as rowan and hawthorn berries, nettles and wood sorrel, Nick has helped create the limited edition Carabus gin. This delicious (and moreish) blend is all for a cause close to Nick’s heart, with £2 per bottle being donated to Buglife in support of Dartmoor’s blue ground beetle (Carabus intricatus – hence the name).

Cheers Nick!

Paul McGuinness

The distillery also creates butterflythemed gins.

O N OUR WEBS ITE SUMMER FLOWERS Capture the fragrance of roses in this recipe for wild rose lokum (also known as Turkish delight)

by Tiffany Francis-Baker: discoverwildlife.com/ wild-rose-lokum GARDEN DETECTIVE Follow this step-by-step guide to making a footprint tunnel, and discover which small mammals are visiting your garden: discoverwildlife.com/ footprint-tunnel DIPPING DELIGHTS Writer and author Kate Bradbury shares her tips for discovering invertebrates living in your pond: discoverwildlife.com/ pond-dipping

July 2021

Save Our Species

BY DOMINIC COUZENS, ILLUSTRATED BY SARAH EDMONDS, HARPERCOLLINS, £10.99

Hot on the agenda of nature lovers everywhere is how to protect the wildlife we live with. Save Our Species: Endangered Animals and How You Can Save Them is a practical guide to understanding and preserving 30 plants and animals that are on the decline in Britain.

With illustrations from Sarah Edmonds, there’s loads of information about well-loved creatures like nightingales, seahorses and puffins, but there are also narratives of

such as the pink sea fan, found in the deep waters of the South West; the shrill carder bee, now in just seven counties; and the grey long-eared bat, resident along the south coast of England.

In each fact file, Couzens offers a description of the threats posed to each species and suggestions on what we need to do to give them the best chance of survival. Throughout the book, there are examples of how to champion the environment with action and advocacy.

Zakiya McKenzie, Nature writer MORE CHILDREN’S NATURE BOOKS

BOOK

BOOK

Empire of Ants

Twitch

BY SUSANNE FOITZIK AND OLAF FRITSCHE, OCTOPUS, £16.99

BY MG LEONARD, WALKER BOOKS, £7.99

If there is no collective noun for ants maybe Empire should be it, as this book entertainingly takes us deep into the societies many of these (mostly females) form.

In it we learn about vampire ants, with queens feasting off the ‘blood’ of their young; swarming navigators across the deserts; and fears for the future of the giant tortoises, due to the vast numbers of ants killing their offspring – “infesting their eyes and anuses”. What a way to go!

This book is written in simple English and all the accounts and research are wonderfully described resulting in much amusement and head shaking at the incredible world these insects have built.

Pay attention to ants – they appear to truly rule this world.

Erica McAlister, Entomologist

Beetle Boy author MG Leonard turns her attention to birds in the first of a new mystery series for kids.

Twelve-year-old Twitch is an outsider who’d rather go off with his binoculars than hang out with his peers. Complete with woodland hideouts, kidnappings, disguises and an SOS sent by pigeon, Twitch is a good old-fashioned adventure story that feels like a modern-day Secret Seven. It’s also a tale of friendship, of being yourself, of seeking solace in nature, and – well – of birds. It is imbued with delicious avian references. Swallows nest in Twitch’s bedroom; teapots are owl-shaped; and the finale, in which the kids apprehend the baddie by ‘murmurating’ around him like starlings, is simply genius.

Sarah McPherson

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Your photos

Amazing images taken by our readers Enter our Your Photos competition at discoverwildlife. com/submit-your-photos

Star photo Peek-aboo frog While on my trek to the forest of Wayanad in Kerala, I saw a pond where the water had turned orange-red in colour, caused by the growth of some sort of algae. Life in any visible form is almost impossible in this pond, but the frogs here manage to survive these conditions by keeping their eyes and nose just above the surface level of the water. An example of ‘survival of the fittest’.

Shabeer Thurakkal, Kerala, India

ENTER TO WIN A ROYAL ROBBINS JACKET This month, our star photo wins a Women’s Switchform Lite Parka or a Men’s Switchform Lite Jacket from Royal Robbins, worth £135 each. These windproof smart shells can be converted into bags, and have eco-conscious, fluorine-free C0-DWR treatment for water resistance. royalrobbins.com

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4 July 2021

OUR WILD WORLD 1 Refreshing dip Melbourne has an incredible colony of greyheaded flying foxes. When they’re hot, they fly close to the water and collect it to keep themselves cool.

Simone Panepinto, Australia

2 A bit of a mouthful I have always wanted to get a portrait shot of a puffin with a mouthful of sand eels, but by the time they scurry back to their burrows, I normally miss out. Fortunately, this one at the Farne Islands in Northumberland took a short break, allowing me to get some close-ups.

Alexander Permain, Gateshead

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3 Eyes of the leopard Night hides are a lesson in patience! After hours of watching in silence at this water hole in South Africa, only accompanied by the hypnotic dance of insects, I was able to capture this leopard drinking.

Anne-Marie Etienne, Sanary-sur-Mer, France

4 Forest-dweller Lion-tailed macaques are found only in the Western Ghats of India, and are primates with complex social structures. When I saw this individual sitting on a moss-covered branch, I knew this would be a lovely image to show this endangered animal in its rainforest habitat.

Amartya Mukherjee, Bangalore, India

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5 Along for the ride

5 July 2021

I was walking on the Somerset Levels when I spotted this swimming grass snake with a damselfly hitchhiker! The snake seemed unfazed and swam around a bit before disappearing into the reeds.

Honour Greenslade, Burnham-on-Sea BBC Wildlife

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WRITE TO US BBC Wildlife, Eagle House, Bristol, BS1 4ST

Trail camera surprise Our trusty trail camera has been positioned to record night-time activity underneath the bird feeder, where we have been getting occasional visits from a hedgehog – roughly every two weeks (assuming it’s the same one each time).

He or she appreciates the hedgehog pellets we scatter in the region, but pays no attention to those in a bowl placed

Penny recorded an unexpected visit from an owl.

Hedgehogs in need

inside a feeding station nearby. We’ve seen field mice visit regularly, jumping through the mesh sides and removing the food, as does a local cat that somehow manages to squirm its way through the small entrance, contort its body into an ‘s’ shape round the baffles inside and eventually extricate itself backwards.

The other night, to my surprise, a video clip showed the feet and lower half of a tawny owl flapping its wings and dancing on the spinning wheel of the nearby upside-down wheelbarrow, before finding its balance and managing to settle. Have we provided a fairground ride and exercise machine, or maybe just a convenient perch from which to hunt the wildlife we’ve attracted?

Although I have changed the angle of the camera to get a better view of the wheelbarrow, the owl has not returned, so it remains a mystery.

Penny Bodger, via email

governments worldwide sanction the destruction of forests in order to build high-speed rail links, airport extension runways and gigantic shopping centres.

John Coldwell, France

BBC Wildlife

so to home a hedgehog in our enclosed garden! A lot of garden centres sell hedgehog homes.

Ian Alcock, via email Hugh Warwick replies: It is always tempting to think a garden could support a hedgehog, but for a successful rehabilitation they would need to be released back into a population, so if the garden is part of a ‘hedgehog highway’ then it could work. All you need are 13cm holes to let them in – and neighbours

on the grounds of age, disability, ethnicity, gender, sex or otherwise, have legal protection. However, animals are denied rights because of the assumption of human superiority (speciesism).

The connection between speciesism, racism and sexism, illustrates that we have failed to eradicate prejudice in our society. A legal system that endorses control over another species is immoral and unjust.

Unless our society is happy to continue treating animals in the same way as we once treated black people and women, it is time we had an animals’ charter to promote and protect the rights of animals.

Kim Pearce, High Wycombe It is often stated that we share about 99 per cent of our DNA with chimpanzees. More remarkably, we also share 70 per cent with slugs and 60 per cent with fruit flies.

If we accept that all life on Earth evolved from a distant relative, then it must follow that all living creatures are our ‘cousins’. Cultivating that way of thinking about them might make us more inclined to both safeguard and regenerate the planet and campaign for animal legal rights.

Dr Bill van Marle, Herefordshire Should animals be given more legal rights? Yes, I certainly July 2021

Tawny owl: Penny Bodger; Hedgehog: David Tipling.

Hugh Warwick’s feature was excellent (Helping hedgehogs, spring 2021), showing just what determined and caring people do to protect the environment.

However, I feel a rising sense of fury when I think about the Hugh Warwick’s piece made way that governments and me wonder if people with small world leaders seem to throw back gardens could adopt a the responsibility for the hedgehog from a rescue centre, welfare of our wildlife back on the individual.

Can hedgehogs Yes, it is wonderful that be easily released we have built hedgehog into gardens? highways and houses, and leave out food for them, just as we have been encouraged to plant beefriendly flowers, stop using pesticides and create wild patches in our gardens so that we can make a difference. Meanwhile, 96

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OUR WILD WORLD feel that the great apes should enjoy the same protective rights as humans. Such protection described in the article would require United Nations backing.

How likely is that?

Malcolm Stathers, via email I wholeheartedly agree that there should be greater protection for animal rights, but there are obvious issues – where do you draw the line? Our interference with the natural balance of an ecosystem may involve some animals becoming dominant to the detriment of others, and sometimes they might need to be controlled (humanely, wherever possible, of course). I strongly agree in principle, however, and I guess it would need to be carefully managed and involve case-bycase judgement.

Aynsley Halligan, via email

TALES FROM THE BUSH

Peepers peeled for a pygmy When Jo Caird went diving in Malaysia, patience and eagle eyes were needed to spot the tiniest of seahorses.

CORRECTIONS Spring 2021, Wildlife watching, p19: The caption says ‘a colony of grey seals’, but should read ‘a colony of common seals with one grey seal’.

May 2021, Mike Dilger's Wildlife watching, p20: The Falls of Clyde (1) should have been located further south on the map, and the Dulnain River (2) should have been located further north, where the number 1 marker is.

QUIZ ANSWERS (see p99) 1B, 2A, 3B, 4C, 5A, 6B

July 2021

ou get pretty good at spotting tiny creatures when you have a photographer for a scuba-diving buddy.

While most divers hunt for spectacular coral formations or large species like sharks and sea turtles, photographers take a different approach.

My buddy, for example, is content staying on a patch of reef for 20 minutes or more, absolutely motionless as he waits for a perfect shot. Which leaves me to pootle about nearby, prevented from straying too far by the buddy system.

Not that I’m complaining. Being forced to slow down in this way means I’ve become skilled at noticing things divers in more of a hurry might miss. The glint of a shrimp’s eyes in a rocky crevice, say, or a flat fish hidden in the sand. Yet even with a decade of macro-spotting experience under my belt, I couldn’t for the life of me pick out the pygmy seahorse against the gorgonian coral it was supposedly clinging to.

We were in Malaysia, diving off a tiny island called Mabul about an hour’s boat ride from Borneo. It wasn’t hard to locate the beautiful fan-shaped corals that pygmy seahorses – tiny fish that grow to a maximum length of 2cm – call home. They

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could be found all over the reef, their delicate structures standing strong against the current. Our dive guide, Scott, led us to one fan. It wasn’t terribly large, the size of a small suitcase perhaps.

This won’t take long, I thought.

How wrong I was. I scanned the knobbly branches of the coral, but came up with nothing.

I got as close as possible to get a better view, but had to avoid touching it – to do so would risk irreparable damage. I switched positions to continue my search.

Still no luck. Finally Scott came alongside me and pointed to a specific spot. It took me 30 seconds before I saw it: a purple creature the length of my littlest fingernail, covered in pink bumps almost identical to those of the fan it was curled around.

I looked away for a moment to check if my buddy had spotted it too. When I looked back, I couldn’t find the seahorse again. I knew it was still there, but it may as well have disappeared. I moved on to let another diver have a go, shaking my head at the most marvellous feat of camouflage I’ve ever witnessed.

S I scanned

the knobbly branches of the coral again and again.T

JO CAIRD is a freelance journalist based in the UK. Read more about her work at jocaird.com.

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Steve Pretty

Now you see it… a well-camouflaged pygmy seahorse hides among the branches of this fan coral.

Devastation in Brazil Wise and, hopefully, prophetic words from Mark Carwardine (My way of thinking, spring 2021) on utilising the International Criminal Court to challenge and charge the environmentally destructive world ‘leaders’ such as Bolsonaro. Perhaps a positive step would be to establish something like Wild Justice, with its incisive legal campaigning, on the world stage – active on similar (but global) lines.

Our own nations, especially with the UN Climate Change Conference (COP26) arriving soon in Glasgow, could easily be viewed as hypocritical for challenging the desecration of the Amazonian rainforest, while remaining silent on the ineffectual legislation to stop grouse shoot estates burning all of our uplands.

Clive Swinsco, via email

Have a wild tale to tell? Email a brief synopsis to catherine.smalley@ immediate.co.uk

ADVERTISEMENT FEATURE

HELPING FINCHES IN A PINCH With wild birds threatened by disease, a new feeder offers a safer way to welcome avian visitors into your garden.

WATCHING BIRDS FLIT about a feeder is one of the pleasures of having a garden. But when it comes to the species we love, are we killing them with kindness?

The answer, unfortunately, could be yes. Huge numbers of wild birds have been lost in recent decades to a parasitic disease commonly transmitted on bird feeders. This disease, known as trichomonosis, typically affects finches – the British Trust for Ornithology estimates that between 2006 and 2015 Martin Hughes-Games (below) has called the Finches Friend a “brilliant innovation”.

trichomonosis wiped out nearly three million greenfinches within the UK. “As well as greenfinches, many other birds including house sparrows, siskins, chaffinches and bullfinches are affected,” says natural history TV presenter Martin Hughes-Games.

Two people who saw first-hand how quickly trichomonosis can affect a wild bird population are Dick and Tina Woods from Kent. The couple loved the 60 or so finches, particularly greenfinches, that flocked to their feeders. Then, over a few weeks in 2016, all the greenfinches died.

The Woods were shocked. Spurred into action, they found out more about trichomonosis and how it spreads, and Dick decided to do something about it.

With more than 40 years of industrial design and manufacture experience, he took on the challenge – and with enthusiasm.

An effective way to lower trichomonosis transmission is through good hygiene at feeding stations. Damp food can

For more information, visit finchesfriend.com

encourage the spread of the parasite, and feeders should be cleaned weekly, but most are fiddly to take apart and reassemble. So Dick set about designing a bird-friendly, easy-clean feeder.

“The key was separating the feed store from where the birds feed,” says Dick, as where birds perch tends to be where the disease is passed on. After four years of research and development, he 3D-printed a feeder that solves the problem. Dick now works with a local injection-moulding firm to produce two commercial, recyclable versions with a low carbon footprint: a large feeder that can hold four types of feed, and a smaller version containing two feed chambers.

The Finches Friend Cleaner Feeder is built to last and has a feed station that’s easily removed as well as a storage section that keeps seed dry.

Each feeder comes with a spare feed station so you can use a clean one while you wash the other.

Dick and Tina have already seen the benefits of the Cleaner Feeder in their own garden. “The Finches Friend feeders worked,” says Dick. “The greenfinches returned.”

OUR WILD WORLD

PUZZLES

Win a prize with our crossword, and test your wildlife knowledge.

Answers in our September 2021 issue

Wild quiz

ACROSS: 7 alula, 8 rosary pea, 10 verdin, 11 redstart, 12 throstle, 13 acer, 15seriema, 17 skylar, 20 apes, 22 anserine, 25 king crab, 26 ribbon, 27 tree cobra, 28 krait.

DOWN: 1 blue

sheep, 2 gladioli, 3 moorhen, 4 aardvark, 5 myrtle, 6 zebra, 9 gnat, 14 francoline, 16 mushroom, 18 lyrebird, 19 catbird, 21 piglet, 23 surf, 24 fibre.

MAY’S WINNER D Moir, Essex ACROSS 8 Oak, ash, elm or beech, perhaps (4) 9 ___ buzzard, raptor of central Asia and north Africa (4-6) 10 8 across, in the genus Salix (6) 11 Coloured patch on the secondary wing feathers of some birds (8) 12 Fruiting bramble (8) 14 Long-billed waders, venerated in ancient Egypt (6) 16 Male deer (4) 17 Cephalopod that might be giant or colossal (5) 18 Gorillas and chimpanzees, say (4) 19 Dark-plumaged Old World bird that might be spangled or racket-tailed (6) 21 Pine ___, forest finch of the subArctic (8) 23 Flat-billed duck, Spatula clypeata (8) 26 White herons (6)

27 North American plant with pea-like flowers, in the genus Baptisia (4,6) 28 Of a habitat, dry, desert-like (4) DOWN 1 Frugivore (5,5) 2 Plant-eating scale insect, often regarded as a pest (8) 3 Bloom (6) 4 Social insects (4) 5 Colourful North American thrush (8) 6 Rodent of Central and South America (6) 7 Country whose national bird is the Andean cock-of-the-rock (4) 13 Offspring; juveniles (5) 15 Songbird of the family Paridae, endemic to the Philippines (7,3) 17 Country that is home to RSPB reserves at Copinsay, Fetlar and Nigg Bay (8)

18 Tree-dwelling (8) 20 28 across, US state, noted for chaparral and pinyon-juniper habitats (6) 22 Spotted cat (6) 24 Extinct species of New Zealand wattlebird (4) 25 Bird such as a crake, coot or gallinule (4)

Getty Images

MAY’S ANSWERS

1) What is so unusual about wombat poo?

A It’s white B It’s cubed C It smells like flowers

to humans

2) Which is the world’s most poisonous snake?

A Inland taipan B Black mamba C Saw-scaled viper

3) A shrimp’s heart is located in its…

A Tail B Head C Lower abdomen

4) What is a slow loris?

A A miniature sloth B A type of snail C A venomous primate

5) Which of these three animals can run the fastest?

A Hippopotamus B Crocodile C Human

6) The harbour porpoise is also known as…

A Mitchell’s dolphin B A puffing pig C A bay fish

Crossword compiled by RICHARD SMYTH, quiz set by CLAIRE VAUGHAN

Find out the answers on p97

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WILDLIFE CHAMPION

ELLA AL SHAMAHI In our series about people with a passion for a species, we ask chimpanzees fascinate her.

Interview by Paul Bloomfield

Can you tell us what a palaeoanthropologist is?

to suggest that handshakes are far older than our species. Just because both chimps and humans do something today, it doesn’t necessarily mean that our common ancestor definitely did – it could be convergent evolution. But there are other biological reasons to think so.

An archaeologist who is concerned with deeper time. I don’t wake up for anything under 10,000 years old, personally. Basically, we spend our time studying human evolution.

Why did you start thinking about chimpanzees?

When Covid-19 hit, articles emerged saying the handshake was dead, and that it was a relatively recent cultural phenomenon – a sign that you’re not carrying a weapon, or spread by European missionaries. But there’s so much evidence that the handshake is biological. So I synthesised a theory, which is the basis of my book – and that involved exploring chimpanzee handshakes. Palaeoanthropologists are always fascinated with chimps, because they’re our closest living relatives. It’s not like the Neanderthals

Should we view chimpanzees differently, then?

S Chimps display So why do chimpanzees shake hands?

I spoke to Cat Hobaiter, at the University of St Andrews, who

so many behaviours that challenge ideas of human exceptionalism.T

ELLA AL-SHAMAHI is a palaeoanthropologist, TV presenter, stand-up comedian and writer. Her latest book, The Handshake: A Gripping History, is published by Profile Books in hardback, £9.99.

The expert view With an already restricted geographical range, wild chimpanzee populations are declining by as much as 80 per cent in some places. The more we study our closest living relatives not only reveals fascinating insights into our own evolutionary history, but helps illuminate the conservation plight of these incredible non-human beings.

Ben Garrod, professor of evolutionary biology and science engagement at the University of East Anglia.

His book series, EXTINCT (Zephyr, £15), is out now.

July 2021

Ella: BBC Studios/Clare Jones; chimpanzee: Anup Shah/naturepl.com

chimps shake hands – or feet – after a fight, as if they’re making up. Or a higher-ranking chimp will shake the hand of a lower-ranking individual, seemingly to calm the latter’s nerves. It’s very similar in Homo sapiens.

Absolutely. They display so many behaviours that challenge ideas of human exceptionalism. People say: we use tools, we invented the iPhone.

Well, chimps manipulate tools – they use twigs to extract ants from nests, for example. They even seem to do things just to show off. Humans see ourselves as distinct from the rest of the animal kingdom – that’s one of the reasons we’ve exploited the natural world so much. Chimpanzees are very, very loudly demonstrating that we’re not that different at all. And look at how we are treating them – chimps are Endangered, thanks largely to human actions. If we can’t treat our closest relatives better, it doesn’t bode well for us.

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