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Code-breaking experts at GCHQ are said to be 'satisfied' that the pigeon-borne message assumed to have been sent during World War Two cannot be decoded without access to the original cryptographic material.

They were set an intriguing challenge following the discovery of a pigeon's skeleton in the chimney of a house in Bletchingley, Surrey. The message – hand-written on a small sheet of paper headed Pigeon Service – was found in a small red canister still attached to the pigeon's leg bone.

During the war, the methods used to encode messages naturally needed to be as secure as possible and various methods were used. The senders would often have specialist codebooks in which each code group of four or five letters had a meaning relevant to a specific operation, allowing much information to be sent in a short message. For added security, the code groups could then themselves be encrypted using, for example, a one-time pad.

A BBC Panorama programme on the postponement of the planned badger cull in Gloucestershire and other areas has sparked a number of rows between the opposing camps. In the programme, National Farmers' Union president Peter Kendall suggested individuals within Natural England may have wanted the badger cull policy to fail.

The culls were postponed until next year after a survey showed there were considerably more badgers in the two pilot areas than initially estimated, making it impossible to achieve the desired proportion of kills.

Interviewed on the programme, titled Badgers: dodging the bullet?, Mr Kendall said the estimates put the NFU and the companies set up to administer the cull in West Gloucestershire and West Somerset 'on the back foot'.

The key catalogue of information on 'alien', or non-native, species in Europe has undergone a major update. The Delivering Alien Invasive Species Inventory for Europe (DAISIE) database provides policy-makers and other experts a comprehensive overview of which alien species are present in Europe and their consequences for the environment and society.

The DAISIE online database, at www.europe-aliens.org, was relaunched on 13 September at the NEOBIOTA conference in Pontevedra in Spain. It contains details of over 12,000 alien species and plays an important role in tackling the threat of alien species within Europe.

The Law Commission is seeking views on how wildlife law should be modernised and simplified and has launched a consultation, running until November.

According to the commission the current law regulating wildlife is spread over a collection of Acts dating back to 1831, the original purpose of which of the law was to govern activities hunting, fishing and, of course, poaching. More recently that has expanded to the conservation specific species, ensuring the welfare of wildlife and now protecting local biodiversity from invasive species.

The result, says the commission, is a legal landscape that is "out of date, confused and often contradictory". For example, the hunting, management and welfare of pheasants is governed by four separate statutes.