Millions of critically endangered eels have indeed been exported from Britain to Russia this year, but this is not “bonkers”, as Andrew Kerr of the Sustainable Eel Group claims, as it is a project to conserve the species that was in development before the invasion of Ukraine by Russia (UK export of millions of endangered eels to Russia attacked as ‘bonkers’, 22 October).

Juvenile eels are transported from the Severn estuary to the Vistula and Curonian lagoons, which Russia shares with Poland and Lithuania. Unlike the River Severn, the lagoons are pristine habitats for eels, with unrestricted migratory pathways to the Baltic and thence to their breeding grounds in the Sargasso Sea.

In contrast, the wetland eel habitat of the Severn has been destroyed by modern agriculture, industry, housing estates and pollution. What little remains is inaccessible to the eels because of the human-made barriers to migration, including locks and weirs used by pleasure boats, and flood defences. Therefore, most of the eels that swim into the Severn estuary perish.

A city council has awarded £50,000 to a group planning to buy 35 acres of natural habitat to create a nature reserve.

The popular area in Salisbury, known locally as Broken Bridges, is part of a former farm and is in the River Avon Site of Special Scientific Interest (SSSI).

Now designated as an asset of community value, a not-for-profit group has agreed a price with the owner and is trying to raise £250,000 to buy the land.

The latest funding means the group has reached more than £200,000, with Jeremy Nettle, chair of the Broken Bridges Community Interest Company, calling it "a tremendous step forward".

An initiative to save one of Scotland's most endangered species of tree has been launched in the Cairngorms National Park.

Aspen provides a vital habitat for rare wildlife, plants and fungi and is one of Scotland's most important native trees.

The tree was once common but deforestation and overgrazing has caused it to largely disappear from the Scottish landscape.

A new partnership between the rewilding charity, Trees for Life, and the Cairngorms National Park Authority will map the location and health of the existing aspen population and use the information to guide the planting of new trees.

Campaigners have called for an “ecological Domesday survey” requiring large landowners to report on how they are looking after their land for nature.

They say the assessment, so-called for its echoes of the Domesday survey nearly a thousand years ago in 1086 that asked landowners to report on the land they owned, would help deliver a much-needed boost for nature.

Landowners with 1,000 acres or more should be required to submit wildlife surveys and plans for how they will restore habitats, species and carbon stores every five years, which should be made available online to the public, the leading conservationists say.

Butterfly experts are celebrating the completion of an £8,000 project to help Chalk Hill Blues, Brown Hairstreaks and Grizzled Skippers in Somerset.

National charity Butterfly Conservation has erected the new 850-metre boundary around its Stoke Camp nature reserve in the Mendip Hills.

The fence is not to keep butterflies on site, but the all-important cows and sheep that graze the vegetation and create perfect habitat for a host of rare and vulnerable species.

Public encouraged to ‘have your voice heard’ in third National Park consultation, following community conversations, surveys and fieldwork.

NatureScot has opened the formal (statutory) consultation on whether a new National Park should be established in Galloway and parts of South and East Ayrshire. The consultation will include looking at what a potential new Park might consist of - from its boundary to its board makeup, and even what the Park could be called. It will also seek to gauge opinion on the proposal and alternatives to it.

The formal consultation will run from today (7 November) until 14 February 2025 and is accessible on the NatureScot website and in print, audio and Gaelic versions. During the second half of November, a consultation leaflet will be distributed to 52,000 households and businesses within the proposed area.

Rising above the rich woodlands of the Duddon Valley lies Mart Crag, one of several Cumbrian landmarks that are reminders of the historical presence of the pine marten, an elusive forest dweller that was once widespread in Cumbria and across the UK.

Now a project led by the University of Cumbria has thrown a lifeline to the few remaining pine martens in the south of the county. It has released 13 healthy adults (eight females and five males) in Forestry England’s Grizedale Forest and the Rusland Valley. The animals were moved recently under licence from strong populations in the Scottish Highlands*.

In Cumbria, a growing movement of landowners and conservation groups share a vision to restore nature by returning native species as the building blocks of healthy ecosystems. Twenty years ago, many species were endangered or completely absent in south Cumbria.

Connecting the Coast, an ambitious three-year Nature Recovery project backed by Welsh Government funding, is drawing to a close, having taken impressive strides in protecting and enhancing the fragile ecosystems of the Pembrokeshire Coast National Park.

The project, designed to safeguard coastal habitats and enhance biodiversity in farmland adjacent to the iconic coastline, works in close collaboration with local farmers and landowners, to restore habitats, strengthen ecosystem resilience, and promote sustainable land management.

Connecting the Coast has yielded impressive results, with land management changes creating flourishing habitats for wildlife. This is evident in the reappearance of coastal wildflowers like centaury and sheep’s bit where conservation grazing has been implemented and the appearance of scarce arable plants, such as weasel’s snout and bugloss, in crop margins that have been left unsprayed.

Conservationists on an island 28 miles off the UK mainland are concerned after signs there may be a mouse there, potentially putting a colony of seabirds at risk.

Mice and rats have been eradicated from St Agnes in the Isles of Scilly, as part of measures to protect its "nationally significant population of storm petrels".

The Isles of Scilly Wildlife Trust said "probable" signs of a mouse including droppings and urine had been spotted, and suspects the creature was brought in within some animal feed.

The trust has been running a successful program with the RSPB and others to get rid of rodents on the islands for the past decade, which has led to the petrel population "bouncing back", it said.

Almost 56m litres of sewage was dumped in a river in 2023, according to campaigners.

The Cleddau Project said Welsh Water data showed pumps at Picton in Haverfordwest, Pembrokeshire, were running at 80% capacity from July 2022 to February 2024.

That meant 55,857,000 litres of waste - equivalent to 17 tankers a day - which should have been going to a sewage treatment plant, was instead going into special conservation area the Western Cleddau.

A coalition of nature charities including Butterfly Conservation is battling plans to put a golf course on an internationally-important wildlife site for the second time in 10 years.

An application to create the leisure facility at the Coul Links site on the east coast of Scotland will be discussed at a public inquiry starting on Monday (11 November).

The threat to this precious place has shocked many across Scotland and the coalition is working together to oppose the plans. The coalition is made up of Butterfly Conservation, Buglife Scotland, Marine Conservation Society, National Trust for Scotland, Plantlife Scotland, RSPB Scotland and the Scottish Wildlife Trust.

Nature campaigners have called for taxpayers to take stakes in forest and peatland projects designed to store carbon, to avoid all the profits from carbon credits going to private investors.

A report from the Revive Coalition, an umbrella group for Scottish land reform and conservation charities, says carbon credits also need to be used much more effectively to bolster demand and help the UK meet its net zero targets.

It argues that current policies are failing to restore nature quickly enough: it notes that upland areas are so heavily degraded by overgrazing and deforestation that Scotland is one of the most nature-depleted countries in the world.