The Guardian

The commonest garden bird in Iceland, and no stranger to the Scottish Highlands, this visitor is taking the bunting equivalent to a holiday in the Med

Some birds are simply more compelling than others. Think bullfinches and barn owls, peregrines and storm petrels, gannets and golden eagles. The snow bunting is certainly high in the charisma stakes. I first saw them in 1973, swirling around a shingle beach in Norfolk, caught in a biting wind like flurries of snow. Since then I’ve watched them on their breeding grounds in Iceland, where they are the commonest of the very few “garden birds” found in that northerly land.

Once, I even saw one singing in the car park at Reykjavik airport. And I’ve often come across them in the Cairngorms, where they feed on the crumbs left by passing skiers. But we don’t often get snow buntings in Somerset. So when I heard that one was spending the winter on my local patch alongside the River Parrett, I headed down there as soon as I could.

Often ignored, the ancient sites in the hearts of towns and villages have become refuges for a tremendous range of plants

There are thousands of wild plant sanctuaries across Britain, many in the hearts of villages, towns and cities, but they’re often ignored and forgotten. Cemeteries, churchyards and burial grounds have almost become nature reserves.

Some of the most ancient sites have been around for over 1,000 years, and many grounds haven’t been assaulted with chemicals or intensive management – tighter spending has actually helped even more by cutting back on over-management. And so these sites have become refuges for a tremendous range of plants, including some of our most threatened grassland plants and old trees, mosses, lichens and flowers, as well as wildlife.

If Guardian readers wish to get up close to peregrine falcons (Flying high, 15 March) they need go no farther than their computers where, by typing in “Nottingham peregrines cam” or something similar, they will be able to sit back and watch the comings and goings of the birds to their nest-box high on Nottingham Trent University in the very centre of the city. I did that, entranced, a couple of years ago as I watched the four chicks grow up and fly away.

The cameras are put in each year by Nottingham Wildlife Trust and are proving invaluable for spotting details of behaviour that can only be remarked upon when the subject is under scrutiny round the clock by someone, somewhere.
June Perry
Nottingham

Once daredevils, cyclists and pedestrians work out just how safe they are with this new technology (Google’s self-driving car avoids hitting a woman chasing a bird, theguardian.com, 17 March), it is easy to imagine how there might be a battle for rights of way. Busy crossings during rush hour could become an unbroken stream of pedestrians as self-driving cars wait helplessly. It is only a small leap from here to imagine the physical measures that may need to be implemented to keep vehicles and pedestrians separate. Fenced in pavements? Raised roadways? This technology could have bigger impacts on our built environments than we are currently anticipating.
Robert Cullen
Gothenburg, Sweden

• Join the debate – email guardian.letters@theguardian.com

We need to learn from the Danish supermarkets, where organic produce is front and centre, not niche

Say you were to swap your weekly shop with a Dane, you’d notice something strange. In Danish supermarkets like SuperBrugsen, myriad organic products are proudly displayed at the front. Try tracking down anything more exciting than an organic carrot in a UK supermarket.

With this in mind our Organic Trade Board wants us to be more Danish and go mainstream organic. There’s some way to go. In 2014, our organic spend here was just £30.60 each for the whole year. Cynics might say that this equates to one organic chicken.

How the Guardian reported the grounding of the Torrey Canyon supertanker and what was then the world’s worst oil spill

On 18 March 1967, the Torrey Canyon, one of the world’s biggest tankers, ran aground between Land’s End and the Isles of Scilly, leaking more than 100,000 tonnes of crude oil into the sea. It was the UK’s worst oil spill to date, causing major environmental damage with more than 20,000 sea birds contaminated. The first Guardian report about the disaster appeared on 20 March.

The UK’s biggest ever oil spill in 1967 taught invaluable lessons about the response to disasters, toughened up shipping safety and stirred green activism

“I saw this huge ship sailing and I thought he’s in rather close, I hope he knows what he’s doing,” recalled Gladys Perkins of the day 50 years ago, when Britain experienced its worst ever environmental disaster.

The ship was the Torrey Canyon, one of the first generation of supertankers, and it was nearing the end of a journey from Kuwait to a refinery at Milford Haven in Wales. The BP-chartered vessel ran aground on a rock between the Isles of Scilly and Land’s End in Cornwall, splitting several of the tanks holding its vast cargo of crude oil.

George Orwell wrote a shocking account of a colonial policeman who kills an elephant and is filled with self-loathing. But was this fiction – or a confession? An Orwell expert introduces the original story

British imperialism being a largely commercial concern, when Burma became a part of the empire in 1886 the exploitation of its forests accelerated. Since motorised transport was useless in such hilly terrain, the timber companies used elephants. These docile, intelligent creatures were worth their weight in gold, hauling logs, stacking them near streams, launching them on their way and sometimes even clearing log jams that the foresters could not shift.

In the 1920s a young would-be poet, an ex-Etonian named Eric Blair, arrived as a Burma Police recruit and was posted to several places, culminating in Moulmein. Here he was accused of killing a timber company elephant, the chief of police saying he was a disgrace to Eton. Blair resigned while back in England on leave, and published several books under his assumed name, George Orwell.

New Forest To some, fallen timber makes for an untidy forest. There was a time when the woodsmen would have cleared much of it away. Not now

We’re standing deep into the trees, looking through an oval porthole constructed from the boughs of a toppled oak. The sun is filtering through the still bare canopy to light up the story of this wood. As we look through the window, we are taken into its past, present and future.

The brown of autumn’s leaf drop mingles with the emerald-green of mosses. To one side, dark-green stems of butchers’ broom promise flashes of ripened scarlet berries in months to come. The stiletto blades of bluebells are just breaking free of the blanket of fallen leaves that has protected their bulbs through the winter months. Already they suggest a scene transformed, as yesterday’s base-brown becomes a wash of blue. Tall, erect trunks stand like sentinels in a painted backdrop, and mid-stage lies a tangle of branches, looking as though some huge beast has shed its antlers.

The week’s top environment news stories and green events. If you are not already receiving this roundup, sign up here to get the briefing delivered to your inbox

International Energy Agency report puts halt in emissions from energy down to growth in renewable power

Carbon dioxide emissions from energy have not increased for three years in a row even as the global economy grew, the International Energy Agency (IEA) said.

Global emissions from the energy sector were 32.1bn tonnes in 2016, the same as the previous two years, while the economy grew 3.1%, the organisation said.

Nesting bald eagles, Adélie penguins and a newly hatched Komodo dragon are among this week’s pick of images from the natural world

Hibbertia fumana, thought to have been extinct for 200 years, has been rediscovered in Sydney’s west

A newly rediscovered rare plant – thought to have become extinct almost 200 years ago – has sparked a legal action in Sydney’s west against a development that threatens the flower’s only known location.

About 370 specimens of Hibbertia fumana – a small flowering shrub endemic to Sydney – were found on the grounds of the proposed 83-hectare Simta Moorebank transport hub late last year.

The nose of a shrimp, the spines of a seahorse, the claws of a crab: Jean Painlevé’s camera captured them all – and turned them into massive, monstrous, mysterious works that caused a sensation in the 1930s. Now the aquatic explorer, famed for his films of copulating seahorses and dancing snails, is receiving his first solo UK show, at Birmingham’s Ikon gallery

Cromford, Derbyshire The towpath is popular with Derbyshire folk making their version of the passeggiata, often with dogs, and the water vole is easily spooked

William Jessop was a generous man, always ready to give a fellow engineer a leg up. Building the Cromford canal, in the Derbyshire Dales, he hired Benjamin Outram, the son of a local investor, as his assistant. Their great work terminates at Cromford Wharf, once a harbinger of the industrial revolution, now dozing in the evening sunshine, its crumbling stonework the colour of honey.

The northern section of the canal, five miles from the wharf to Ambergate, is a site of special scientific interest, noted for being a last redoubt for water voles, a change of use I doubt Jessop could have foreseen.

Adani ‘categorically’ rejects letter signed by 91 prominent Australians as protesters confront Queensland premier during tour of Adani’s Indian HQ

Cricket great Ian Chappell has stood by his opposition to the Adani mine proposal as part of a group of prominent Australians branded “elitist wankers” by a federal government MP and “a very small group of misled people” by the Indian miner.

Chappell said it was “worthwhile” if joining his brother Greg in an open letter calling on the Indian miner to abandon its coal plan thrust the issue into the public spotlight in its cricket-loving homeland.

Deputy prime minister wants bans lifted on exploration and development, and royalties paid to landholders

The Nationals leader, Barnaby Joyce, has called for states to lift the bans on coal seam gas and has urged them to follow South Australia’s plan to pay royalties as compensation to landholders.

The deputy prime minister, who is also the minister for agriculture, said lifting the gas bans should not occur on a carte blanche basis because of the need to protect prime agricultural land and productive aquifers. However, he did not say how prime agricultural land should be defined.

The administration has unveiled President Donald Trump’s first budget, including a proposed 31% cut in funding to the Environmental Protection Agency. The cuts would remove funding for the Clean Power Plan and scrap all climate change research programs and partnerships. White House budget director Mick Mulvaney confirmed on Thursday that the new administration had no interest in funding to combat climate change, saying: ‘We’re not spending money on that any more. We consider that to be a waste of your money’

• Budget would gut EPA programs tackling climate change and pollution

A woman stumbles across rafts of debris to make it to safety after being caught in a huge mudslide that crashed through the outskirts of Lima. Media reports in Peru said Evangelina Chamorro Díaz, 32, escaped without serious injury. “She is a little confused, but she is very well and will recover because she is a warrior and thank God nothing serious happened,” health minister Patricia Garcia said after visiting Díaz on Thursday. Several days of unusually heavy rains have killed at least a dozen people in the country.

MCS takes some haddock fisheries off green list – but Scottish fishermen accuse it of ‘dressing advocacy up as science’

It is among the most popular fish in the UK, but haddock may soon be off the menu in some fish and chip shops because of dwindling stocks.

Haddock from three North Sea and west of Scotland fisheries have been removed from the Marine Conservation Society recommended “green” list of fish to eat, after stocks fell below the acceptable levels in 2016.