Ingham’s W RLD

PARE a thought for the Prostrate Perennial Knawel. It is well named. This brittle little plant with white flowers from East Anglia’s Breckland is on its knees. So too are the splendidly named Bearded False Darkling Beetle (the smaller the creature, the longer the name), the Royal Splinter Cranefly, the narrowheaded ant and 16 other species which most of us have never heard of and would not even know if they came over and gave us their card.

But this unhappy club of 20 endangered species was this week given a £4.6million lifeline from the Heritage Lottery fund. The Back from the Brink programme will bring together top conservation experts to work for the greater good of this little band.

Groups as diverse as the RSPB and Buglife, Plantlife and the Amphibian and Reptile Trust will work with Butterfly Conservation and the Bat and Bumblebee Conservation Trusts – even though most of the 20 species on the rescue list do not come under their various wings.

But, as anyone who paid attention during biology lessons will understand, saving the ladybird spider and the Northern dune tiger beetle will help scores of other species in slightly less trouble. Create the right conditions for the most threatened, restore nature’s balance, and you will help scores of other struggling species.

Natural England says Back from the Brink will provide a fillip for 200 other species such as the lesser butterfly orchid, grey long-eared bat, pine marten and willow tit.

It will even help the hedgehog which may seem to be everywhere but has suffered huge declines in recent decades. Imagine a Britain without Mrs Tiggywinkle.

The anonymous Gang of 20 are really the first piece of an ecological jigsaw that could help bring nature back to a better state of health.

But why should any one care, apart from obsessives studying, say, the shrill carder bee?

Well, Sir David Attenborough’s latest masterpiece, Blue Planet II, is the most watched British TV programme of the year.

An awful lot of people care about wildlife. Many probably never go out with binoculars in search of wildlife but they like it if beamed into their living rooms.

There’s a much more fundamental reason: protecting the environment is in our interests. Man could easily wipe out everything, including himself, that is not immediately economically useful. But the world would be a nastier and much less healthy place.

So raise a glass to the oak click beetle and the Purbeck Mason Wasp and wish them well. If they survive, so might we. A HERO sniffer dog who helped British troops capture a Taliban stronghold will today be presented with the animal Victoria Cross, the PDSA vet charity’s Dickin Medal.

Mali, an eight-year-old Belgian Malinois, saved several lives in Afghanistan by twice running through direct fire to find explosives, repeatedly revealing the positions of insurgents and never giving up during the seven-hour operation despite being wounded three times by grenades.

He was hit in the chest, legs, face and ear and lost a tooth. His handler, who cannot be named, also won a gallantry medal for his courage in the 2012 firefight. Happily after emergency treatment Mali made a full recovery.

Now retired from the front-line, he is training other Army dogs at the Royal Army Veterinary Corps back in Blighty. Those pups are learning from a real dog of war. GREEN TIP: Reduce your heating bill – wear a jumper AFRICAN elephants are being slaughtered at the rate of up to 40,000 a year by poachers to supply the insatiable Far East demand for ivory. So how has Donald Trump decided to help? By lifting the ban on importing elephant trophies killed in Zambia and Zimbabwe. Genius. TREES may save lives by fighting urban pollution, an Exeter University study has claimed. It found much lower rates of hospital admissions for asthma in the most polluted areas if there were lots of trees, reports Environmental International. Trees remove pollutants that trigger asthma attacks. And as a sufferer, I definitely want more townie trees.