Total wipe-out... 500 species are lost to England in wilds of time

A survey of English wildlife populations over the past two thousand years has identified 500 lost species – most of them over the past two centuries.

Natural England, the Defra subsidiary in charge of wildlife

conservation, will launch what it calls "the most complete audit of hundreds of years of England's wildlife winners and losers" at the London Zoological Society today.

The official reason for it is the UN has designated 2010 International Year of Biodiversity but Natural England is also preparing for a likely review of its burgeoning role after the general election.

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The lists in its report Lost Life: England's Lost and Threatened Species start with the brown bear, wolf and wild boar, and come up to date with concerns for the red squirrel, common toad and European eel. Apart from 492 species known to have been made extinct, nearly a thousand are at serious risk. And those figures cover only what human science has discovered.

"We estimate 55,000 species are or were native to England " the report says. "We know 492 of these have been lost within historic times, most within the last 200 years. For certain invertebrate groups and fungi, the number of species is unknown, so it is impossible to say exactly what has been lost."

Many of the lost species were tiny plants or insects but Helen

Phillips, chief executive of Natural England, said: "Like rivets in an aeroplane, the overall structure of our environment is weakened each time a single species is lost. With more and more of our species and habitats confined to isolated protected sites, we need to think on a much broader geographical scale about how we can reverse the losses of the recent past and secure a more solid future for our wildlife."

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Fifteen years ago, the UK's first Biodiversity Action Plan listed 390 species needing urgent help. Of those, 45 are now increasing in numbers, including otter, water vole, nightjar, woodlark, sand lizard and pool frog; 128 are stabilised, including tree sparrow, bullfinch and basking shark; and the decline of 22 has been slowed, including dormouse, grey partridge and great crested newt.

Successful revivals include the red kite – thanks partly to nurturing on the Harewood House estate, between Leeds and Harrogate.

Peter Nottage, Natural England's regional director for Yorkshire and the Humber, said: "Although this report highlights some successes, it really emphasises just how much there is still to do. We need a step-change that goes beyond targeted protection of individual sites and species and focuses on restoring the health of ecosystems across entire landscapes."

Some of the lost species – such as the great auk and Ivell's sea anemone – are now globally extinct. The latter was lost from its last known site in the world, a brackish lagoon in West Sussex, as recently as the 1980s.

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Dr Phillips says in her preface to the report: "It may be too late for Ivell's sea anemone, but let's not just be the generation who realised the scale and impact of the loss of biodiversity, let's also be the generation that did something about it."

On average, every English county has lost one species of plant every two years since 1990.

The biggest black mark against Yorkshire is for playing a part in the near-extinction of the northern bluefin tuna, the largest of the tuna family. It was once common in the North Sea and a tuna sport fishery developed between Scarborough and Dogger Bank in the 1930s. At the same time, the Norwegians were developing a bluefin fishery which took 10,000 tonnes a year in the 1950s while boats sailing from Scarborough were still taking some. Now numbers are so low the sport is over and it is feared the remainder of the species will be mopped up under existing quotas for professional fishermen.

Copies of the report can be had online at naturalengland. etraderstores.com/NaturalEnglandShop/NE233/

Lost, saved and still under threat

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n Recent extinctions in England have included the chequered skipper butterfly, the mouse-eared bat and the great yellow bumblebee.

n The marsh fritillary butterfly vanished from Yorkshire in the 1870s, the "astonishing" lizard orchid hasn't been seen here since 1940. The stone curlew has not been since the 1950s.

n The corncrake, or land rail, once bred in almost all English counties after arriving from Africa in late April. But it is reluctant to break cover and many nests were destroyed by mechanised harvesting. The Lower Derwent Valley Nature Reserve, near York, is its last refuge in England.

n The bittern has become a favourite conservationists' example of what money can do. The number of males reported booming for a mate went up from 19 in 1999 to 75 in 2008, thanks to reedbed restoration and creation.