Rare Scots rainforests home to wildlife from giant slugs to white-tailed eagles

dailyrecord.co.uk:

Rare rainforests are home to wildlife from eagles to the world's largest slugs and lichen which looks like dragon skin, say conservationists battling to save them.The Woodland Trust has unveiled a list of 11 of the "weird and wonderful" wildlife which make their home in temperate rainforests found across the UK, including in Scotland.

The forests once covered a fifth of Britain, but they have been lost from all but 1% of land area.Conservationists say this is a result of felling, overgrazing and conversion to other uses, face ongoing pressures including invasive species and are more threatened than their tropical counterparts.

Yet, according to conservation experts who have launched a project to restore and increase rainforests in the UK, they are still home to a "huge diversity and abundance of species", some of which are found nowhere else on Earth.Close to the ocean, with temperate climates and high rainfall of more than 1.4 metres a year, the forests provide damp, humid conditions which can be a haven for more than 200 species of bryophytes such as mosses, and 100 to 200 species of lichen.The species making their home in Britain's rainforests include:- Stinky sticta lichen which has a smell like fish.- Tree lungwort which has frilly fronds like the inside of lungs and was thought to be a treatment for lung disease by Anglo Saxons and medieval people.- The blue ground beetle, one of the UK's rarest and a sign of a healthy rainforest.- The white-tailed eagle, the UK's largest bird of prey which is making a comeback after becoming extinct here in the early 20th century, and which often nests in rainforests and hunts in the nearby sea, bringing nutrients back to the forest.- Hazel gloves fungus, which grows exclusively