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Half of Britain’s butterfly species are now listed as threatened with extinction after five more joined the new “red list” of endangered butterflies.

The increase in the number of species listed as “vulnerable” from nine in 2011 to 16 today is a warning that time is running out to save the 58 resident species, according to Butterfly Conservation, which compiled the red list from scientific monitoring data according to the criteria set out by the International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN).

But there are positive trends on the list, which covers data from 2010-19, with two of the species most threatened with extinction, the large blue and the high brown fritillary, moving out of the most at-risk category after targeted conservation.

The large blue, which became extinct in 1979 but was reintroduced from Sweden, has moved from “critically endangered” to “near threatened”, the least risky of the IUCN endangered assessments apart from “least concern”. It is thriving on restored wildflower grasslands in the Cotswolds and Somerset.

In recent years, the high brown fritillary has been seen as the species most likely to become extinct since the large blue.

But conservation efforts in south-west England and at its sole remaining site in Wales have proved successful. The butterfly has rebounded, even while its distribution across sites continues to shrink, meaning it is now “vulnerable” rather than “critically endangered”.

“Given that the overall picture is one of increasing risk, the fact that highly threatened species that have been the focus of conservation effort have become less threatened is a real positive,” said Richard Fox of Butterfly Conservation. “With significant effort and resources we can at the very least hold these species and in some cases turn them around.”

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Other success stories include the Duke of Burgundy and the pearl-bordered fritillary, which moved from “endangered” to “vulnerable” after targeted conservation action by charities and local communities.

But there are growing concerns for other once-thriving species that have slipped into “vulnerable” category. The Adonis blue, chalkhill blue and silver-spotted skipper have moved despite decades of conservation work boosting their numbers.

All three species require warm, short, flower-rich chalk grassland, and all declined disastrously in the mid-20th century with the loss of such grassland and a reduction in traditional grazing.

Since the 1980s, all three have been revived and were appearing to benefit from climate warming, moving north to new sites. However, their decline in the past decade may be caused by new factors, such as increasing nitrogen deposition – from farm fertilisers and vehicle pollution – that lead to vigorous grasses crowding out the more delicate wildflowers butterfly caterpillars need to survive.

“It’s disappointing to see these species going back into the threatened group,” Fox said. “Insidious changes in the environment from climate change or nitrogen or both mean the habitat created by conservation management 20 years ago does not necessarily produce the same results today.

“Land managers are continually having to experiment to produce suitable habitats for species such as these because everything else is changing. In the Netherlands, scientists are convinced nitrogen deposition is a major factor in the decline of some of their rare butterflies.”

The negative impact of global heating is evident in the inclusion in threatened categories of all four butterflies found in cooler, northern habitats.The large heath, scotch argus and northern brown argus are now listed as “threatened” and the mountain ringlet as “near threatened”. All four species are likely to disappear from the southerly parts of their range.

The red list requires five years of positive data before an endangered species can be considered to be reviving and so the new list does not yet reveal improvements.

These include a resurgence for the wood white after intensive conservation management. While another butterfly, the large tortoiseshell, listed as extinct, has mysteriously reappeared in several locations in southern England as a breeding butterfly since 2019.

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More than 40 Australian animals at the highest risk of extinction in the next two decades could be saved – and it would take only a small amount of extra conservation effort to achieve this, according to new research.

A team of Australian scientists has identified the 63 vertebrates they believe are most likely to go extinct by 2041, and found at least 47 can be brought back from the brink.

They say while the data is alarming it presents an opportunity for the new Albanese government to invest in conservation improvements.

The 47 animals include 21 fish, 12 birds, six mammals, four frogs and four reptiles, with nine of those species estimated to have a greater than 50% risk of extinction in the next 20 years.

Among the most desperate are small freshwater fish from the group known as galaxiids, including the stocky galaxias – found in the Kosciuszko national park – and Victoria’s Yalmy galaxias and West Gippsland galaxias.

These fish live in the headwaters of streams where the main threat to their survival is invasive trout.

Other animals considered at high risk include the western ground parrot, found in Western Australia, the swift parrot, which is under pressure from logging in its habitat range, and Victoria’s Baw Baw frog.

Prof John Woinarski, one of the paper’s co-authors, said the research was an opportunity to take action to prevent extinctions.

“We have no excuses for not saving these species. We know which species they are, where they occur and what threatens them,” he said.

There was greater concern for another 16 animals – five reptiles, four birds, four frogs, two mammals and a fish – on the list of 63, for which there were no recent confirmed records.

The scientists said at least four of those species were almost certainly already extinct, including the Christmas Island shrew, which was last seen in the 1980s, and the Victorian grassland earless dragon.

“That’s a sobering reminder that what we know of the extinction of fauna in Australia is probably a fraction of what have really become extinct,” Woinarski said.

He said the picture was also likely to be worse for invertebrate species, which were often overlooked in conservation planning.

Research leader Stephen Garnett, of Charles Darwin University, said the future for the remaining 47 species was more hopeful and that the actions required to save them were affordable.

More than half of the habitat for those animals falls within conservation reserves and the habitat range for several was small, meaning targeted conservation efforts to address threats such as invasive species were possible.

“These are not hugely expensive projects because they are localised,” Garnett said.

Some animals, such as the King Island brown thornbill and the swift parrot, would require tougher protections to prevent clearing of their habitat.

A King Island brown thornbill. Photograph: Chris Tzaros/Birds Bush and Beyond

Other simple steps for government would be to ensure all of the species were officially listed for protection under national environmental laws.

At the time of research, the scientists wrote that 25 of the species, including 18 fish, were not on the national threatened species list.

Sarah Legge, one of the paper’s co-authors and a member of the threatened species scientific committee which advises the federal government on new listings, said work had begun to address this.

She said all of the species identified in the paper were now either listed for protection or were being considered for listing.

The federal election campaign delivered little focus on nature, despite multiple official reviews in the last term of government recommending major changes to arrest to decline of Australian wildlife.

But the swing to more environmentally minded candidates has sparked hope within the conservation movement.

Two days before the election, Labor announced several new environmental commitments, including that it would establish an independent environment protection agency and would commit to conservation targets on land and in marine areas.

Euan Ritchie, a professor in wildlife ecology and conservation at Deakin University, he said the scientists who worked on the paper had demonstrated more wildlife species were likely to go extinct in the near future unless there were “urgent and substantial improvements to conservation policy and actions”.

“It’s well established that Australia’s conservation record and ongoing predicament is utterly abysmal,” he said.

“With the recent change of government, perhaps we’ll also see a sorely needed change of heart and a far stronger commitment towards ending Australia’s extinction crisis.”

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There are hopes 50 eastern quolls returned to the wilderness in NSW will spark a historic baby boom for the endangered creatures.

It’s the largest single release of the little predators on mainland by conservation organisation Aussie Ark.

The creatures are now roaming free within the confines of the 400 hectare protected Barrington Wildlife Sanctuary in Barrington Tops, part of the Great Dividing Range in NSW.

Introduced feral foxes and cats – the no 1 killers of native wildlife in Australia – have been removed from the sanctuary to create a pristine habitat for species like quolls to survive, thrive and breed.

Released this week ahead of next month’s breeding season, it’s hoped the quolls will breed with an existing population already released into the fenced sanctuary.

For millions of years eastern quolls were plentiful on the mainland but in the early 1900s disease and feral animals wiped them out in the region.

Dean Reid from Aussie Ark pictured with an eastern quoll set for release. Photograph: Supplied/Aussie Ark

In 2018 a population was relocated from Tasmania to Jervis Bay on the NSW south coast.

The quolls released this week are part of Aussie Ark’s eastern quoll breeding program as well as the larger Tasmanian Quoll Conservation Program. There are now 150 quolls at Barrington Tops, with numbers growing with every breeding season.

The goal is to bolster the species’ population and stop their extinction, Aussie Ark’s Dean Reid says.

“We have released these quolls at the perfect time for them to find mates,” he said.

“We should be able to get back out here in a couple of months’ time and confirm breeding and the presence of joeys,” he said.

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It may be one of the slowest-moving conservation projects in history, not just because of the red tape, but due to the animals themselves: 40 red-footed tortoises are being released into El Impenetrable national park in Argentina in the coming weeks after being rescued from the illegal pet trade in Paraguay and transported to Argentina.

One of the larger tortoises in South America, the red-footed tortoise (Chelonoidis carbonarius) was once found throughout three provinces of Argentina. But the last live tortoise spotted in the country was in the north-eastern province of Formosa in 2002. A shell was found in the same province, 40 miles (60km) from El Impenetrable, in 2016.

“In other parts of the Gran Chaco, in Paraguay and Bolivia, for example, it’s still a relatively common species,” says Sebastián Di Martino, conservation director of Rewilding Argentina. In Argentina, the consumption of its meat and the illegal pet trade are two of the key drivers of the tortoise’s demise, he adds.

“The widespread destruction of the Chaco forest, their habitat, is another cause. In fact, the last known population in Argentina lived in Formosa, where the forest was razed to plant soya beans.”

As new homes go, El Impenetrable, in northern Argentina, is spacious; it contains 128,000 hectares (317,00 acres) of protected reserve with dense native forest, grasslands and wetlands.

The first red-footed tortoises make their way out into the Gran Chaco forest in Argentina. Photograph: Courtesy of Rewilding Argentina

“The primary reason for reintroducing the red-footed tortoise is to ensure the conservation of this species,” Di Martino says.

But the tortoises also have a vital job to do to help restore and maintain genetic diversity in a region that’s been one of the hardest hit by deforestation. “Above all, it is about bringing back its important ecological role,” adds Di Martino.

“They’re called the gardeners of the forest because, like other tortoises, the red-footed tortoises consume great amounts of native fruit and then disperse the seeds, contributing to the regeneration of forests and the dispersion of many plant species, which maintains genetic variability. We’ve already observed that the specimens in quarantine are voracious consumers of different native plants.”

Sometimes, I’ve closed my eyes and imagined a tortoise walking in the Chaco forest once again. Now it’s real

Gerardo Cerón

The tortoises came to Argentina from Urutaú wildlife refuge in Filadelfia, Paraguay. The process has not been easy or fast. “Transporting wild animals in Argentina is extremely difficult,” says Di Martino. “The international and national transport of wild animals in danger of extinction is forbidden in Argentina, so all transportation for rewilding projects must be done with special permissions that take months to process.

“The importing of 40 tortoises from Paraguay was an important step, as it was the largest international transporting of individual animals in the framework of a conservation project. Little by little, these barriers are being broken down, but there is still much work to be done.

“Also, all animals that enter rewilding projects must go through a rigorous quarantine before being released, to avoid introducing undesirable pathogens into the environment. The development of these tests was particularly expensive and involved a great deal of work from our veterinary teams.”

The tortoises’ new home is El Impenetrable national park. Photograph: Rewilding Argentina

The tortoises have been held in groups of 10 in four pre-release enclosures for several weeks to acclimatise. The first group have now been released, with another group planned for release each week to allow more intensive monitoring of how the animals adapt to the Chaco forest. Each tortoise has a tracking device attached to its shell.

For those involved, it has been emotional. “Sometimes, I’ve closed my eyes and imagined a tortoise walking in the Chaco forest once again, the pattern of light and shadow filtering through the leaves to its shell, hearing the fallen leaves crunch under its weight,” says a conservation coordinator, Gerardo Cerón. “It’s hard to explain the happiness and emotion knowing it’s now real.”

The red-footed tortoises spend several weeks in the enclosures to help them acclimatise before they are released. Photograph: Courtesy of Rewilding Argentina

The project is already off to an unexpectedly positive start, with news that two females have laid eggs in their enclosures, digging nests in the ground and laying at least four each. The eggs take three to seven months to hatch, which is expected to happen between September and November, with the arrival of the first rains after the dry season.

The nests will be protected from predators, while the team waits for the new tortoises to emerge. Cerón is optimistic for the animals’ future in the park, as long as researchers can keep track of them – tortoises are not as slow as people think and can walk long distances in a day, as well as being known to take refuge in hard-to-access areas.

“I’m confident the tortoises will do very well,” he says. “They’re adult specimens, very large and with very resistant shells. The Chaco forest has many fruits, leaves and cacti for them to eat, and there are almost no poachers inside the national park, especially in the release sites. The challenge will be for us to monitor them in the closed and thorny forest. But, like the tortoises, we will find a way.”

Find more age of extinction coverage here, and follow biodiversity reporters Phoebe Weston and Patrick Greenfield on Twitter for all the latest news and features

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The spotted tree frog was already recovering from local extinction when the “Black Summer” wildfires of 2019 to 2020 raged through New South Wales (NSW) in Australia. Of 250 to 300 frogs once released into the wild, only about 10 survived.

But now, the critically endangered species is receiving yet another lease on life. The government has released 80 spotted tree frogs into Kosciuszko National Park.

“Releasing these 80 Spotted Tree Frogs back into the wild despite all the setbacks this species has faced is a reminder to have optimism about the conservation work we’re doing, because it’s clearly making a positive difference,” NSW Minister for Environment James Griffin said in a press release.

The spotted tree frog (Litoria spenceri) is a medium-sized amphibian that lives alongside mountain rivers in the Australian states of NSW and Victoria, according to the Victoria state government. The females are slightly larger than the males, growing to around 60 millimeters in length, and have a dappled olive-gray and green skin that helps them blend in with streamside vegetation.

“The Spotted Tree Frog is fundamental to the maintenance of ecosystem health in the NSW upland rivers where it lives,” Department of Planning and Environment senior threatened species officer David Hunter said in the press release. “It occupies many streams where they are the only frog species, and tadpoles of this species consume nutrients and algae in large numbers. They are also food for other species such as snakes, birds, mammals and predatory invertebrates, playing an important role in the food web.”

Lead Image: A spotted tree frog. Jason Edwards / The Image Bank / Getty Images.

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The free tumble of yellow and red as the goldfinches swerve in the spread of colour is infectious. Like throwing a pack of cards up and seeing the court faces fall, there is a regal brightness, and such thrall in their deft abandonment to air. These distinctive finches, with striking red, white and black heads and yellow wing bars, are uncommonly vivacious. They shimmer and swoop in rampages of energetic flight.

In his Cook’s Tale, Chaucer describes his apprentice protagonist as “lively … as goldfinch in the glade”. This liveliness has also been translated as boldness, flamboyant dress, even joy. While we may not be able to tell if these birds feel happiness, we know that goldfinches have long evoked pleasure in their human observers. Their arresting colours and song made them popular as caged birds in the 19th century, with large numbers taken from the wild to supply the demand, taking them to the brink of extinction in Britain.

‘Now the apple blossom is out, I step into the scented drip of shaking white and pink where the goldfinches have shot up from the petals.’ Photograph: Robin Fox/Alamy

While their population has now recovered significantly, more than doubling since the 1970s, this caged history makes their buoyancy seem even more celebratory. Chaucer found his goldfinch-like apprentice “full of love … as is a beehive full of honey sweet”.

Now the apple blossom is out, I step into the scented drip of shaking white and pink where the goldfinches have shot up from the petals. I am sprinkled in spring perfume as the flowers stir then settle back into the branches. High, the flashing bodies twist: one, two, three entwined as they lift up into the boughs of the pear, making a theatre of the air; it is difficult not to get swept up in the action. Theirs is an irresistible attraction, a sweeping rush of momentum that longs to take you with it.

Highly sociable, a generous spirit of raucous play follows these birds through their beaming display. Could it really be said that they are full of love? It is not our privilege to know. But their residue of sweetness runs thick and full and slow, pouring through the lengthening light, a trail of spring’s ebullient life.

Country Diary is on Twitter at @gdncountrydiary

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