Nature

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Nature

Why Britain's butterflies are desperate for a dry summer

Britain's butterflies are in desperate need of good weather in 2008 or they may experience a population "catastrophe", conservationists said yesterday.

Inside Nature

Global warming threat to native dragonfly species

Tuesday, 22 April 2008

Britain's dragonflies, which date back to the dinosaurs but are increasingly threatened by habitat destruction, pollution and climate change, are to be the subject of a major national survey.

Birds of prey face persecution

Tuesday, 22 April 2008

Birds of prey are being killed illegally in large numbers across the UK, according to the RSPB.

The great migration crisis

Monday, 21 April 2008

Many of the birds that migrate to Britain and Europe from Africa every spring, from the willow warbler to the cuckoo, are undergoing alarming declines, new research shows.

Why flowers have lost their scent

Sunday, 20 April 2008

Pollution is dulling the scent of flowers and impeding some of the most basic processes of nature, disrupting insect life and imperilling food supplies, a new study suggests.

Pollution: How farmers got up British noses

Sunday, 20 April 2008

In 1858, we had The Great Stink, a foetid miasma caused by raw sewage busily fermenting in the Thames. It was so bad in London that Parliament decamped to Hampton Court. Last week, we had The Mild Whiff, a vaguely unpleasant scent getting up nostrils from Devon to Durham, which provoked more than 1,000 emails to the BBC.

Rügen: German island's 'white cliffs' collapsing into the sea

Saturday, 19 April 2008

The towering chalk cliffs that form the spectacular coastline of the Baltic holiday island of Rügen have been immortalised by 19th- century Romantic painters and are Germany's equivalent of the white cliffs of Dover – but now they are collapsing into the sea.

The sound of silence: Britain's lost birds

Saturday, 19 April 2008

Listen: on this chilly afternoon at the end of March, Blean Woods are reverberating with birdsong. Several robins are uttering the twittering warbles that proclaim their territory, a chiffchaff is slipping out its metronomic, two-note call, and every couple of minutes a green woodpecker fires off its yaffle – its staccato burst of notes carries through the trees. Over it all a song thrush is singing from the top of a still-leafless chestnut, silhouetted against the sky; it is enormously loud for such a squib of a thing, each phrase repeated with such cold sweet clarity that it triggers in the mind Philip Larkin's memorable catching of just such a bird, singing in a garden at just this time of year: "its fresh-peeled voice/ astonishing the brickwork".

A species threatened by avarice of man

Friday, 18 April 2008

It has been coming for a long time – the first extinction of what zoologists refer to, ironically, as the Charismatic Megafauna, the group of big wild animals that have always captured our imagination, from lions and tigers to elephants and giraffes.

More nature:

In Pictures

Endangered species To mark Earth Day we've collected together images of endangered species around the world, along with Independent articles about their decline

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