🐿️ Little wildlife stories that give me hope

Hey folks! My last couple of weeks went into building a small wildlife game, but the real-world updates are even better: red squirrels are back on the move, an Essex wetland is booming, and London is about to welcome its first storks since 1416.

Red squirrels reclaim their old range

Red squirrels are quietly reclaiming the Scottish Highlands. A decade-long reintroduction effort has shifted hundreds of animals into carefully chosen forests, and their range has grown by more than a quarter since 2016. It’s a comeback from the brink: the species was once nearly wiped out in Britain, hunted as a forestry pest and squeezed out as woodlands disappeared. Even now, recovery is slowed by a virus carried by invasive grey squirrels.

Today, roughly 80% of the UK’s 200,000 red squirrels live in Scotland. Yet large parts of the north and north-west Highlands had lost them entirely, with the last sightings often dating to the 1970s. Reintroductions have started to fill those gaps, stitching the species back into landscapes where it had vanished for generations.

From tunnel spoil to bird haven

Almost 40,000 birds now gather on a nature reserve built from London’s spare soil. When engineers dug the tunnels for the Elizabeth line — the city’s new rail link — they ended up with millions of tonnes of soil. Three million tonnes were shipped to Wallasea Island in Essex, between the splendidly named River Roach and River Crouch, and used to raise the ground and shape new wetlands.

The RSPB, the UK charity that protects wild birds, bought the island in the mid-2000s and spent years preparing it as a safe place for birds to feed and nest. In 2015, they broke the sea wall so tides could flow over the land for the first time in 400 years. They then built small islands, lagoons and salt marshes, some made entirely from Elizabeth line soil. The wetlands now help protect nearby villages by absorbing stormwater.

Wallasea used to have very few birds. Now it’s full of life: avocets with their upturned bills, knot waders that flock in dense clouds, grey plovers on the tide line and bar-tailed godwits with round-trip migration flights of over 29,000 km.

London prepares for its first storks in 600 years

Next year, white storks will return to London for the first time since 1416. They’ll be released in Barking and Dagenham in east London on a landscape that’s been steadily restored from old gravel pits into wetlands.

The plan follows the success of the Knepp rewilding site in West Sussex, where Britain’s first modern stork chicks hatched in 2020. Since then, the birds have begun spreading outwards, with 45 young storks fledging this year before migrating to southern Europe and north Africa.

The project will later introduce beavers, whose dam-building should create more wetland edges and boost insect, amphibian, and fish life. A dedicated stork officer will work with local schools and community groups, and London’s Green Roots Fund is providing £500,000 to build the aviary, install fencing and support the team running the project.

What about that game?

So, I turned my afternoon park walks into a tiny puzzle game. Merge the birds you actually find along the River Ravensbourne and see how far up the chain you can get. It works in any browser, is free, has no ads, and is, frankly, dangerously addictive.

And that’s it for today! Thanks for reading! If you enjoy the newsletter, share it with a friend. And if you really enjoyed it, consider upgrading to a paid subscription: it helps support my work and means a lot.

Elia Kabanov is a science writer covering the past, present and future of technology (@metkere).

Cover art: Elia Kabanov feat. DALL-E.