Endemic (exploring wildlife unique to Britain)

Endemic is a beautiful book that focuses on Britain’s endemic wildlife (of the 70,000 species, quite a few plants, animals and fungi are unique to these islands). Here they get their moment in the spotlight!

The author travels the country to seek out:

• • Ground-weaver spiders in Plymouth (at risk of extinction)
  • The Orkney vole (only found on these tiny Scottish islands)
  • Alien fungi (on the roadsides of Norfolk)
  • Ghostly cave shrimps (in Devon’s depths!)

Along the way, he meets experts who are devoted to studying and helping our rare plants and creatures, and sometimes are single-handedly saving them from global extinction. Many are at risk of disappearing forever, because most of us have no idea they even exist.

James Harding-Morris is a passionate nature enthusiast, who treks up mountains in search of flowers, and scours fens for elusive moths.

Concern over Political Wildlife Policies

After discovering that 80% of Reform UK voters are concerned that the party has no wildlife policies (and is planning to return rewilded land to farming), it has hired Ben Goldsmith (half-brother of environmentalist Zak Goldsmith) to flesh out policies, to try to win more votes.

Presently, the party policy is to scrap the Habitats Directive, the Birds Directive and water pollution controls, in order to generate more business income. Removing these laws would lead to more development and intensive agriculture, and likely more sewage pollution, floods and wildfires.

This would place many of our protected areas (wetlands, hedges, chalk streams, ancient woodlands, sand dunes, peatlands) at risk, which in turn would harm birds and native wildlife.  Friends of the Earth describes their plans as ‘a scrappage plan to speed up the demise of UK wildlife’.