The Guardian

Wenlock Edge The blackbird’s wings have the flutter of panic as he tries to navigate through the house to find an escape

The unmistakable fan-snap of feathers announces the arrival of a visitor. A dark blur up the stairs, a spike of electric current. There is a palpable disturbance to the order of things when there’s a bird in the house; perhaps that’s why it’s associated with ill omen. The blackbird hops through the back door following a trail of breakfast cereal.

We have become familiar to each other. We share the same space in the backyard where he forages, and we leave crumbs and titbits. It could be that he was born in the garden and has known us all his life, as did his parents. Now he has a nest and a brood of chicks to feed, we listen to him sing; we live in parallel and have retreated to our separate worlds, until now.

Webs of tens of thousands of arachnids combine to form thick netting above trees in north-western Tasmania in ‘mass ballooning event’

Deluged homeowners in Tasmania’s north-west are not the only residents of the waterlogged area to seek higher ground.

Vast translucent covers have formed above trees in towns such as Westbury in the wake of storms and the state’s worst floods in 40 years.

In a message for Australia, the actor and chatshow host says she’s a big fan of ‘your beautiful, great, wonderful Great Barrier Reef, which is home to my favourite fish, Dory’. The video is part of the Remember the Reef campaign that coincides with the release of her latest film, Finding Dory. DeGeneres provides the voice of Dory in the sequel to 2003’s critically acclaimed Finding Nemo. Disney will work with the Great Barrier Reef Foundation and the Great Barrier Reef marine park authority to help raise awareness of the reef’s decline. For more information visit rememberthereef.com

Oxford University study could shed light human brain function and whether facial recognition is an innate or learned ability

A tropical fish can tell one human face from another despite lacking a brain section that homo sapiens and other “smart” animals use for this task, scientists said Tuesday.

The astonishing ability was demonstrated in experiments with eight archerfish, a tropical species best known for spitting pressurised water jets to shoot prey out of the air.

Christopher Abbott says orderly evacuation seen during Japan’s Fukushima incident would not work as well in western societies

Western societies would not respond well to a Fukushima-style nuclear disaster due to a lack of public information, a leading disaster expert has warned.

Christopher Abbott said he firmly believed that the public ought to be better educated over the hazards and risks they may face.

Janet Russell asks the right question (Letters, May 30). What has happened to the report on shale gas by the UK Climate Change Committee (CCC)? When Professor Cowern and I gave evidence in February, we were assured that the report would be published no later than May. We have also been told unofficially that the CCC has accepted our data on fugitive emissions of methane and that shale gas is two times worse than coal from a climate change perspective. We also submitted a further paper towards the end of March, indicating that over half of the rise in atmospheric levels of methane seen globally since 2007 is due to oil and gas, notably shale extraction in the US, and that this is obscuring the rise in methane emissions from the Arctic. I suppose it would be highly embarrassing for the government if its “dash for gas” was found to be incompatible with our climate change commitments, agreed by the UN but implemented via EU legislation. Embarrassing unless the government accepted the scientific case and announced it was going to abandon fracking and invest in renewables.
Dr Robin Russell-Jones
Stoke Poges, Buckinghamshire

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

Longer days helped solar panels generate 50% more electricity than coal across the whole of May, analysis shows

Solar power in the UK produced more electricity than coal across the whole of May, the first ever month to pass the milestone, according to research by analysts at Carbon Brief. Solar panels generated 50% more electricity than the fossil fuel across the month, as days lengthened and coal use fell. Solar generated an estimated 1,336 gigawatt hours (GWh) of electricity in May, compared to 893GWh output from coal.

Coal was once the mainstay of the nation’s power system but the rapid rise of solar panels and of climate change concerns has seen its use plummet, leading to a series of milestones in recent weeks.

My lifelong friend and colleague Mike Croxford, who has died aged 71, was a pioneer of recycling in his native Wales. The Welsh government’s current recycling performance – at 60% it is fourth in Europe – owes much to Mike, who was a founder member of the Zero Waste movement worldwide and of the Zero Waste International Trust.

His interest in recycling began in 1980, while running the Augusta Street youth project in Cardiff. The young people started collecting newspapers to improve their standing among local people and to fundraise to run events for the community. The project turned into the Community Support Anti-Waste Scheme (CSAWS) that in 1986 initiated the first citywide collection scheme in the UK.

Lizzie Carr catalogued vast amount of plastic junk clogging 400 miles of waterways as she paddled through during her 22-day journey

A woman who paddled 400 miles up the length of England’s waterways found them choked with thousands of plastic items, from bottles and bags to toys and dummies.

Lizzie Carr completed the 22-day challenge on Sunday with swollen knuckles and more than 2,000 photos of plastic junk she found in canals and rivers from Godalming in Surrey to Kendal in Cumbria.

Despite a backlash by some cyclists at the motoring organisation’s Cyclist’s Highway Code, the AA’s new book on cycling isn’t as bad as you might think

When the AA, the UK’s largest motoring organisation, published a Cyclist’s Highway Code on Monday, I thought it seemed like a bizarre but effective way to wind up passionate cyclists such as myself.

I already don’t like the official Highway Code for telling me I “should” wear a helmet and fluorescent clothing to ride around in daylight when studies have concluded neither will make cycling safer for me or the community in which I cycle.

Closing coal plants by 2023 rather than 2025 will cut carbon emissions and air pollution, and boost clean energy projects, Tory thinktank tells government

The UK should close all its coal-fired power stations two years earlier than the government’s pledge of 2025, according to green Conservatives including former energy minister Lord Greg Barker.

The move would not cause the lights to go out, would cut both carbon emissions and air pollution and would boost cleaner energy projects, according to a report from Bright Blue, a thinktank of Tory modernisers.

This unlucky fish came unstuck when it was ‘swallowed up’ by a roaming jellyfish in waters off Byron Bay, Australia. The shot was captured by ocean photographer Tim Samuel, who says the fish was still alive and fighting to escape. ‘It was able to propel the jellyfish forward and controlled its movement to an extent. The jellyfish threw it off balance, though, and they would wobble around, and sometimes get stuck doing circles.’

Australia’s natural wonder is in mortal danger. Bleaching caused by climate change has killed almost a quarter of its coral this year and many scientists believe it could be too late for the rest. Using exclusive photographs and new data, a Guardian special report investigates how the reef has been devastated – and what can be done to save it

It was the smell that really got to diver Richard Vevers. The smell of death on the reef.

Jon Brodie from James Cook University says to give the Great Barrier Reef even a fighting chance to survive, Australia needs to spend $1bn a year for the next 10 years to improve water quality. If we don’t do that now, he says, we might need to just give up on the reef. ‘Climate change is happening much more quickly and much more severely than most scientists predicted’

Terry Hughes from James Cook University in Queensland leads a taskforce measuring the condition of the Great Barrier Reef amid a global coral bleaching event that is ‘off the scale’. ‘The kind of bleaching we’re seeing now is an entirely modern phenomenon,’ he says. ‘We’re now in a very precarious position, where every El Niño that comes along, every five or six years, can potentially bleach the entire Great Barrier Reef’

Richard Vevers from the Ocean Agency had never experienced anything like the devastation he witnessed in May diving around the dead and dying coral reefs off Lizard Island on the Great Barrier Reef. When his team emerged from the water, he says, ‘We realised we just stank – we stank of the smell of rotting animals.’ The reefs around the island have been ravaged by coral bleaching caused by climate change

Paul Crocombe from Adrenalin Dive in Townsville has been taking tourists to the Great Barrier Reef for more than 20 years. ‘We were really fortuntate this time with the coral bleaching that the majority of the mortality is a long way north of here,’ he says. With the reef in danger, he adds, accurate information is needed

Dead and dying coral at Lizard Island on Australia’s Great Barrier Reef. The once brilliant coral is blanketed by seaweed – a sign of extreme ecosystem meltdown. These exclusive photographs are from a series taken by not-for-profit the Ocean Agency as part of its work around the world documenting the longest coral bleaching event in history

Tiny bird flies 59,650 miles from its breeding grounds in Farne Islands in the UK to Antarctica and back again, clocking the longest ever migration recorded

A tiny bird from the Farne Islands off Northumberland has clocked up the longest migration ever recorded. The Arctic tern’s meandering journey to Antarctica and back saw it clock up 59,650 miles, more than twice the circumference of the planet.

The bird, which weighs just 100g, left its breeding grounds last July and flew down the west coast of Africa, rounded the Cape of Good Hope into the Indian Ocean and arrived in Antarctica in November. Its mammoth trek was recorded by a tiny device attached to its leg, weighing 0.7g - too light to affect its flight.

Europe’s influence on cleaning up the air Britons breathe is driven by the 2008 clean air directive but dates back much further

The UK government freely says that almost all its efforts to cut air pollution in recent years have been driven by EU legislation.

There is one reason why air pollution was a big issue in the London mayoral campaign and why the government is facing a legal challenge on its clean-up plans: the EU’s 2008 clean air directive.