The Guardian

Watership Down, Hampshire Disturbingly large and menacing in flight, the billy witch is a beetle of otherworldly workmanship

The day has been hot and heavy and full of the drones of insects sounding up at their own unique frequencies. In the cool of the evening my muscle memory is still swaying, an artefact from the repeated left and right arc of cutting hay on the meadow bank. All day as I worked I’d watched the bees hum and fumble at the flower heads as I cut down through the cornflowers, ox-eye daisies and yarrow at the field’s edge; a meadow’s measure of summer music.

At my desk in front of the wide open window I can hear what sounds like the distant hum of a chainsaw, its pitch changing as it cuts through the wood. With alarming suddenness, the sound is upon me, in the room and loud around my ears as a cockchafer flies past my head and settles on the books by a lamp.

Activist Debi Goenka says Indian coal market, which has swung dramatically against the viability of imported coal for power, will seal Carmichael mine’s fate

Continued attempts by Australian politicians to link Adani’s Carmichael coalmine to the social uplift of the poor in India are “completely ridiculous”, a veteran Indian conservationist says.

Debi Goenka, the Mumbai activist who challenged Adani’s environmental licence for its mine in the Queensland land court in 2014, said Australian government figures continued to rely on arguments about imported coal lifting Indians out of poverty, which were “all bunkum”.

Queen Mary University of London tracked four bumblebees for whole life, and found disparities in how they found food

A study has revealed that bumblebees have distinct personalities.

Some bees play it safe by returning to the same flowers again and again while others search for new sources of nectar, scientists found.

Patrick Barkham on how a colony of rare butterflies living in a healthy elm has become a key element for citizens resisting Sheffield council tree felling

We tend to picture butterflies feeding on flowers, but five British species spend most of their lives in the tops of trees. These insects are often overlooked during their unobtrusive lives. But the white-letter hairstreak finds itself in the spotlight this month as local people fight to save a fine mature elm in Sheffield.

Related: Rare UK butterfly under threat as elms disappear

After boundaries were re-drawn on 1 August, we asked you to share your best pictures of the Yorkshire Dales and Lake District national parks – including the newly incorporated areas now on many walkers’ bucket lists

• See more images and add yours using the blue GuardianWitness button below
  

Analysis by the car manufacturer marks end of the decade as a potential tipping point for the mass take up of electric vehicles, reports Business Green

Public electric vehicle (EV) charge points will outnumber petrol stations in the UK by the end of the decade, marking a potential tipping point in the adoption of zero emission vehicles.

That is the conclusion of a new analysis by auto giant and EV manufacturer Nissan, which argues that based on current trends EV charge points will overtake traditional petrol stations by August 2020.

In drought-prone Chad, 4.3 million people – more than a third of the population – are food insecure, and 176,000 children have severe acute malnutrition, after erratic rains led to ruined crops

Photographs: Peter Caton/Tearfund

Lord Gardiner, who will be involved in reforming EU farming support post-Brexit, receives £49,000 a year in payments, it has been revealed

One of Theresa May’s new environment ministers has been accused by campaigners of a conflict of interest over tens of thousands of pounds he receives annually in EU farming subsidies.

Lord Gardiner is parliamentary under secretary of state and the House of Lords spokesperson for the Department for the Environment, Food and Rural Affairs (Defra), which will be heavily involved in plans for replacing EU farming support.

Like the annual music concert at your child’s primary school, the English Premier League’s offseason can seem endless. But despair not, it does end, and its end is nigh. As Jurgen Klopp would say: “Boom!” So how will you take in the coming Premier League season? Whether you’re a solo spectator, in a group, or out on the town, what steps should you consider taking in order to appreciate all that the world’s most exciting football league has to offer? We’re glad you asked!

Proposals would see the basic income support system of subsidies scrapped and farmers being paid out of public funds for environmental services

The National Trust has called for complete reform of the British farm subsidy system after Brexit, by ending payments for owning land and only rewarding farmers who improve the environment and help wildlife.

“The subsidy system is broken. It is not working. Farmers are going out of business. The state of wildlife is in steep decline and large parts of that is because of intensive agriculture. The vote to leave the EU allows us to think radically about the future of the entire system,” the trust’s director general, Dame Helen Ghosh, told the Guardian ahead of a speech at Blenheim Palace on Thursday.

Warkworth beach, Northumberland Wave-agitated sand had ground down the shell revealing its hidden structure, a helter-skelter chamber

We have beachcombed this tideline on scores of summer days but have only gone home with painted top shells (Calliostoma zyzyphinum) on a handful of occasions.

Of all the shells washed ashore here, this is the most desirable: a pointed yellow cone decorated with purple streaks. Stand it on its tip and it resembles a 1in tall replica of an old-fashioned spinning top.

The South Australian town is abandoning its reliance on expensive diesel and forging a future in which most of its power comes from wind and solar

Coober Pedy is the epitome of the Australian mining town. Located in the South Australian outback, it is as famous for its opals as it is for the extraordinary underground housing that has become a feature of its way of life.

Now the township of 3,500 people may be about to make a name for itself in another way – abandoning its total reliance on expensive, imported diesel fuels for its electricity, and forging a path to a point where most of its power comes from wind and solar with the support of battery storage.

Exclusive: In photographs obtained by the Guardian, a fisherman can be seen selling the rostrums – long, saw-like bills – at a market in Mackay in June

A commercial fisher in Queensland has been caught selling bills of sawfish, which experts say are the world’s most endangered marine fish.

Many of the country’s biggest producers say that without a scheme for seasonal workers, homegrown produce would all but vanish from the shelves

British fruit and vegetables would all but vanish from shops if Brexit means the foreign workers who pick virtually all the home-grown produce are no longer able to come to the UK, according to some of the country’s biggest producers.

They warn that the nation’s food security would be damaged and that produce in UK shops would become more expensive if the freedom of movement for EU workers came to an end. They are urging ministers to set up a new permit scheme for seasonal workers.

New research shows that more birds die from collisions with windows in gardens that provide better bird habitat, reports Conservation

Collisions with windows are a serious source of mortality for birds: hundreds of millions die from window strikes each year in the US alone. Most attention to this problem has focused on high-rise buildings, because each individual building of this type can kill a great many birds.

But because there are so many residential dwellings, even a few collisions per home means that collectively these structures are responsible for a huge number of bird deaths. Yet researchers don’t know why one house has more collisions than another, let alone how to prevent them.

Penguin population declines are found to occur in hotter years

We know the world is warming, and we know humans are the main reason. But so what? The thing we’d really like to know is, what will the impacts be on our planet, its biodiversity, our society, our economies? It is only through understanding the impacts of climate change that action for reducing greenhouse gases can be motivated.

This is one of the reasons I was so interested in a very recent study from the University of Delaware, which addressed how penguins will fare in a warming world. The article was published in Scientific Reports and is available open access so anyone with an internet connection can read it here.

A glass-bottomed walkway on Tianmen Mountain in China’s Hunan province has been opened to visitors. The Coiling Dragon Cliff walkway measures 100m and towers 300m above the scenery below. It is the third glass skywalk on the Tianmen Mountain in Zhangjiajie National Forest Park

Untreated sewage and viruses in Guanabara Bay have led UN to advise athletes to spend as little time in the water as possible

There can be few more beautiful city sights in the world than that from the Marina da Gloria, where the Rio 2016 Olympic sailing events will be launched this weekend.

Look out from the quayside across Guanabara Bay and the panorama takes in Sugarloaf mountain, the Niteroi bridge and the distant hills of the Serra dos Orgãos national park, while behind you are the palm trees of Flamengo Park and the state of Christ the Redeemer.

The Brexit campaign pivoted around migration but its politicians are sceptical of action on global warming that is a key driver of displacement

What happens as large-scale migration becomes inevitable due to a combination of environmental, economic and humanitarian reasons? Do we tackle the drivers and help the displaced, or worsen conditions causing the displacement and reject responsibility for those affected?

BusinessGreen: New study concludes there is ‘no overall relationship’ between tourism employment in an area and the deployment of onshore windfarms

“Repels tourists” can now be added to the long list of criticism levelled at onshore windfarms that has been shown to be unfounded.

A new report by consultancy BiGGAR Economics, which analysed the impact of Scottish windfarms on tourism-related employment in an area, this week concluded there was no evidence to suggest windfarms had an adverse effect on tourism in an area.