Conservationists from the Species Recovery Trust (SRT) have brought eggs of the New Forest cicada — a singing insect last seen in the UK in the 1990s — back to Hampshire from a French military base in Brittany. The eggs are now being cared for at Paultons Park Zoo, marking a further step in a project that aims eventually to re-establish the extinct species in the New Forest, where its summer song has been absent for around three decades.

The team used ultrasound detectors to locate singing males at the 5,300-hectare Académie militaire de Saint-Cyr Coëtquidan, whose mixed woodland and grassland resembles New Forest habitats, and collected 20 bracken stems containing eggs laid inside the plant tissue. The species, Cicadetta montana, remains common in mainland Europe, and the SRT secured Natural England funding in 2023 to explore reintroduction. Any success will be slow: nymphs are thought to spend between four and 10 years underground before emerging as adults, after which cicadas could be released at a secret New Forest location.