Innholdsfortegnelse for July 2021 i BBC Wildlife Magazine

1 | BATS 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, maternity colonies are…

ZSL 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,…

WHAT IS IT? When a species is named after a person, convention holds that the name ends in the suffix ae (after females) or i (males). But what if the person being honoured identifies as neither male nor female? The solution, in the case of this trap-jaw ant named after artist Jeremy Ayers, was to use ‘they’ as the suffix. WHERE IS IT? Just a single specimen has been collected so far, in tropical forest in northern Ecuador. Extensive efforts to find more proved fruitless, suggesting it is very rare. Its spring-loaded jaws may be a specialisation for catching nimble springtails. FIND OUT MORE ZooKeys : bit.ly/NewStrumigenys…

I’m exasperated by the number of naive and self-serving politicians who argue that new carbon-intensive 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…

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 seductive-smelling concoction. The usual way to see night-active moths, however, is to harness their rather mysterious attraction to 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…

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 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…

It 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…

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.…

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.…

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 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 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 ELLA AL-SHAMAHI “Humans see ourselves as distinct from the animal kingdom,”…

Gloriously 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. Confined to the cool climates encountered across much of northern England, with a few outliers…

Animal 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 shark’s fin…

New 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…

For 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…

“More than 20 family units have been identified in Dominica’s waters, mostly groups of related females with dependent calves.” Hectic 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…

Star photo Peek-a-boo 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…

You 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. I scanned the knobbly branches of the coral again and again. 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…

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! 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…

Globeflower 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! Wood cranesbill 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. 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 plumage. Raising one or occasionally two…

Untreated sewage is a significant source of microplastic pollution that is plaguing our rivers, and ultimately our seas, according to ongoing research on the River Tame in north-west England. “Our research has found that channel beds in urban and semi-urban rivers can be very heavily contaminated with microplastics, because untreated wastewaters are routinely discharged into low river flows that are incapable of dispersing the microplastics downstream,” says Jamie Woodward of Manchester University’s Department of Geography. These can remain until the next high-water carries them away. Of the 14 sites sampled, microplastic pollution ranged from 2,400-138,400 particles per kilogram of riverbed sediment. Woodward’s study, published in Nature Sustainability, suggested that wastewater treatment works were efficient at removing larger microplastic particles and so those that were found in the riverbed were most…

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 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…

Conservation 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,”…

In 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 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…

Sue 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…

BIOLOGY Do genitals have other uses? Yes. 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 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 light-sensitive cells are blacked out, they struggle to detect the leaf surface…

Star letter 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 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…