International Women s Day events across Kent including POW Thanet, Maidstone Museum and Kent Wildlife Trust kentonline.co.uk - get the latest breaking news, showbiz & celebrity photos, sport news & rumours, viral videos and top stories from kentonline.co.uk Daily Mail and Mail on Sunday newspapers.
David and Victoria Beckham
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I wasn t the only one to spend 2020 worrying about newts. Like many, the forced confinement of the past year focused me in on my own patch, made me pay attention to things that had previously passed me by. One of the things I noticed was that the area at the end of my garden that had once been a pond was now a weed-grown swamp, devoid of life. Wildlife ponds are having a moment.
Ed Sheeran has had a two-year battle with irate Suffolk neighbours over a vast pond he built to encourage dragonflies, newts and toads (he was accused of wanting to use it as a swimming pool). And last summer David and Victoria Beckham won planning permission for a wildlife lake of their own, although the council specified that they must provide escape routes for aquatic animals when digging out the silted-in site they were seeking to renovate.
Two beavers will be released at a 29-acre site surrounded by housing estates in Shrewsbury, Shropshire, as part of a project to reintroduce the animals across the UK.
A record number of beavers will be released into sites in England and Wales by wildlife trusts this year – 20 years after the semi-aquatic mammal first made a comeback.
Around 20 beavers will be reintroduced to five more counties in 2021, with the first of the releases taking place this week in Dorset when a male and female were let into an enclosed wetland, the Wildlife Trusts coalition of groups said.
Beavers were once native to Britain but were hunted to extinction in the 16th century for their fur, meat and scent glands, leading to the loss of the wetland habitat of lakes, mires and boggy places they were key to creating.