Cicada habitat ready for New Forest return after decades

Animal experts will travel to Slovenia in June where they will look to catch ten New Forest Cicada, or Cicadetta Montana, and bring them back to England, via Vienna. 

The 'singing insects' were once found across the Forest, but there have been no confirmed sightings since the 1990s, so five males and five females will be taken to a specially created cicada habitat at Paultons Park that will hopefully enable them to breed, with some of their offspring released into top-secret woodland glades in January.

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As previously reported, a small team of passionate experts are working on the daring, first-of-its kind Species Recovery Trust (SRT) project.

The team will spend three days hunting through the undergrowth in Idrija Geopark, looking for the exact subspecies. Finding the males will be made easier by using bat detectors to pick up the high-pitched song; but females will have to be found using eyesight alone. 

The precious cargo will be handed over to a specialist courier who will drive the insects to Vienna and put them on a plane to Heathrow, where another courier will get them through customs and hand them to lead project officer Charlotte Carne.

Over the past six months, the Paultons Park team have been creating a cicada habitat that will hopefully enable the species to breed.

They have filled plant pots with hazel tree saplings, hawthorn, raspberry canes and purple moor grass and covered these with netting. The cicadas will be carefully released in male-female pairs into 'honeymoon suites'.

If the females get pregnant, each one will lay several hundred eggs, which should hatch in November. 

If the experiment has worked then one day when the weather is warm in May or June 2030, Cicadetta montana nymphs will emerge at Paultons and the three woodland sites. 

Charlotte said: "For me, there's something about the fact that their calls haven’t been heard for decades. I want my children to be able to walk through the forest in ten or 20 years and hear them; to really experience the sounds of the New Forest.”