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The cuckoo Cuculus canorus is tumbling in numbers in the UK. The latest, unpublished BTO research shows that cuckoos in Britain declined by 65 per cent between 1984 and 2009. The birds may be vanishing because of problems in the UK, such as the disappearance of the moth caterpillars which are their principal food. But it is equally possible that they are running into trouble on their wintering grounds in Africa, or on the various "staging posts" they use on their 3,000-mile migratory journeys.

Neal's Yard Remedies together with activist and campaigner Sam Roddick have launched a campaign aiming to 'highlight the alarming decline of our precious pollinators in the UK and inform, inspire and empower people to help fight to save them'. A petition to ban neonicotinoids, addressed to Secretary of State for Food, Environment & Rural Affairs Caroline Spelman, will be taken to Downing Street in October.

Recent research suggests that the breeding population of Spoon-billed Sandpiper (Calidris pygmaea) was between 120-200 pairs in 2009, with the species believed to be declining at approximately 26% per year, due to extremely low survival of juvenile birds. If this trend continues, the Spoon-billed Sandpiper could be extinct within a decade.

Already many California farms rely on imported European honeybees to pollinate crops. The foreign bees are susceptible to disease, pesticide use and other stressors. Catastrophic die-outs of these honeybees has made headlines in the past, but gone less-noticed is the decline in native California bees, which fertilize between 35 and 39 percent of California’s crops and contribute at least $1 billion to the state's econony, according to a study conducted by UC Berkeley researchers.

Background: Myzus persicae is a globally important aphid pest with a history of developing resistance to insecticides. Unusually, neonicotinoids have remained highly effective as control agents despite nearly two decades of steadily increasing use. In this study, a clone of M. persicae collected from southern France was found, for the first time, to exhibit sufficiently strong resistance to result in loss of the field effectiveness of neonicotinoids.

Sweden is witnessing a steep fall in red clover Trifolium pratense yield in the wake of an alarming decline in the population of such bumble bee species as Bombus hortorum and Bombus pascuorum. Scientists from the Swedish University of Agricultural Sciences and the University of Lund have discovered that the community composition of bumble bee species and their relative abundances have changed drastically over the last 70 years in Sweden. Over the same period, the average seed yield of red clover has declined and variation in yield has doubled, suggesting that the current dependence on few species for pollination of red clover has been detrimental especially to stability in seed yield.