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Hardown Hill, Dorset I skirt the old quarry workings, swamped in spring with bluebells and now swathed with rusty bracken

Old Bottom, as the Marshwood Vale was once called, has filled with autumn rain. Walking means slogging, ankle deep or more, through cold, claggy clay, navigating puddles of yellow water overhung with dripping trees. Time to escape the woods for higher, drier ground.

Hardown Hill is one of a circle of hills and forts ringing the vale. Steep sides of deciduous woodland and gaps of rough pasture run up to a flat top of heath where nightjars call in summer. The summit is open, unfenced common land, home to sand lizards and occasionally Dartford warblers. Villagers used to cut the heath for fuel. Gorse was particularly prized in bread ovens because it burned quick and hot before disintegrating into an insignificant pile of fine ash. In Dorset dialect, gorse was furze, pronounced “vurze”, just as fox was “varx”.

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In China, the drone industry has expressed particular interest in how Unmanned Aerial Vehicles can be used to grow food and maintain crops.  

The Department administers a diverse range of legislation to protect the environment, support sustainable development, give effect to obligations under international conventions and treaties, and implement specific national priorities.

Rats’ agility and keen sense of smell will one day be used to reach parts of shipping containers that sniffer dogs cannot reach

The pangolin – the world’s most heavily trafficked mammal – might have a new champion: rats that will be trained to sniff out trafficked pangolin parts in shipments heading from Africa to Asia.

Ten to 15 African giant pouched rats are being reared in Tanzania to detect pungent pangolin remains as well as smuggled hardwood timber. They are just a few weeks old and most are still with their mothers.

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Eco Energy World secures 2nd solar farm approval in Queensland; both projects likely to use "merchant" funding model.

Gas price jump pushing up electricity prices in Queensland, while post-Trump spike in bond rates will push up financing costs for renewable energy projects.

The 2016 Marrakech Climate Summit finished strongly, despite the election of President Trump, with a multitude of commitments and actions.

Ten Canberra Institute of Technology (CIT) students will travel to Paris in 2017 to study advances in renewable energy.

Trump's position on clean energy and climate change is little different to that of Tony Abbott's, whose policies have been unchanged by Malcolm Turnbull. But Trump's success has unleashed a new push from the lunar right that will make any progress incredibly hard to achieve.

The Ukrainian government now aims to give a new renewable life to the Chernobyl exclusion zone.

Despite signing in 2013, Australia has still not ratified the UN’s Minamata Convention on Mercury.

Now that the election is in the past, it’s worth returning to Tesla’s announcement to see what strategic values or challenges this would bring.

Elon Musk says Tesla's solar tiles could cost less than – and last twice as long as – a regular "dumb roof."

Adani Australia says design and tendering underway for $200m, 100-200MW solar project in Qld Bowen Basin; construction set to begin 2017.

Two short-beaked echidna puggles hit the scales for the first time at Taronga zoo in Sydney – the first born at the zoo for 29 years. The pair were two of three puggles all hatched within a short period from 16-30 August. The youngest was born to mother Pitpa, the last echidna born at Taronga

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Our cultural practices help define us, but when the mood of the world is against us, what do we do? 

Environmental group Friends of the Earth reveals no funding earmarked for natural flood management despite ministerial pledge

The government has been accused of being “all talk and no action” on flood defences, as the first named storm of the season brought flooding and power cuts to the south of England.

Storm Angus saw gusts of up to 106mph recorded 23 miles off the coast of Margate, while gusts of 80mph hit Langdon Bay, also in Kent.

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Originally published in the Manchester Guardian on 25 November 1916

At sundown last night the western sky turned a deep and almost brilliant red, changing and softening in colour in its upward spread until the verge from south to north was like an immense but yellowing rainbow. Then frost came lightly; there was the merest sound of a crinkle in walking over the grass away from the oak wood. This morning the air was softer. On the broad marl and flint track which leads to the farmland there were dead brown mice, one here, another there, and so on to the number of six within the space of a few hundred yards; they had crept from among the withered leaves under the bramble bushes; it is one of the signs that winter is sharpening. No other animal or bird appeared to touch them. A jackdaw that had been hopping (it was more like a short and repeated flight) among a company of rooks cast his eye on one of the dead bodies, seemed as if about to strike or seize it with his beak, but, deciding not to, flitted back-towards the wood.

There the oaks overhang a wide ditch, and their limbs extend a good way over the meadow. Soon after sunrise the rooks came, not in parties as they would earlier in the year, but in a compact body perhaps 300 strong. The acorns have not by any means all been gathered, and they set about the business in almost as orderly a way as if they were a great gang of human workers sent for the purpose of clearing up the food which remained. They were so intent that it was possible to get tolerably near them. And though they worked so systematically, no one or even more birds seemed to be in command. Occasionally one, two, or more would trespass into the patch belonging to or claimed by others, and be at once driven out sharply by a combined rush, but for the most part order was established by general consent. They went as they came. A little later one saw them in a compact body flying east.

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WA's uranium hopefuls are facing a number of challenges, including a low uranium spot price, opposition from traditional owners and the prospect of a new, anti-uranium state government.

The only wild pelican to be seen in Britain in modern times has been attracting birders to Cornwall all summer. But pelicans were here 2000 years ago. Might they return?

It flew in like a seaplane, scattering a flotilla of what looked like small boats as it landed on the waters of the estuary. I blinked, and an avian image displaced this aeronautical one: for it wasn’t an aircraft, but a bird.

A Dalmatian pelican (Pelicanus crispus), to be precise: named not because it has a black spotted plumage (it doesn’t), but after the region of south-east Europe from which it hails. Having landed, it floated serenely amongst the gulls and little egrets, which appeared tiny by comparison with this huge and rather ungainly bird.

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