The Guardian

A leafy seadragon, a flock of galahs and ‘ghostly’ mushrooms are among the subjects captured in some of this year’s best nature photographs.

The 2021 Australian Geographic nature photographer of the year competition is produced by the South Australian Museum. It is open to photographers from around the world for images taken in the region of Australia, New Zealand, Antarctica and New Guinea.

• An exhibition of the photographs is on at the South Australian Museum in Adelaide from 27 August to 31 October.

Some females found to have evolved with bright plumage, which seems to protect against male aggression

They may zip around looking cute and sociable, but the world of hummingbirds is rife with aggression. Now it looks like some female hummingbirds have evolved to avoid this – by adopting the bright plumage of their male counterparts.

US researchers captured more than 400 white-necked Jacobin hummingbirds in Panama.

Group linked to Extinction Rebellion says Queen has ‘blood on her hands’ over hunting and animal agriculture

Animal rights activists linked to Extinction Rebellion have painted the fountain outside Buckingham Palace red, accusing the Queen of having “blood on her hands”.

Animal Rebellion activists stained the fountain and its waters on Thursday, protesting against the use of crown lands for hunting and animal agriculture, as well as the Queen’s attempts to have her land exempted from an initiative to cut carbon emissions.

Officials close eight beaches as residents complain of cloudy, green water that emits a foul smell

Spanish officials have banned the use of fertilisers near one of Europe’s largest saltwater lagoons after five tons of dead fish washed up on its shores.

The alarm bells began to sound in the south-eastern region of Murcia last week as scores of small fish and shrimp began turning up along the beaches of the coastal lagoon known as Mar Menor.

Longer breaks could mitigate some effects of extreme weather due to the climate crisis

I will confess that my sleepy heart sang when I read the news that the National Trust would be introducing siestas for its staff. My people, I thought. A French friend of mine notes that Britain is one of the only countries where it is acceptable to withdraw socially for “a lie down” simply because you’re tired of company, but the working day, in its punishing Protestantism, is a different matter. Part of my dislike of offices, aside from them being the enemy of creativity for anyone who needs peace in which to work, is that there are never enough places to nap.

Naturally, I’ll be met with accusations of laziness for even saying this. We are in the middle of a tedious and strung-out debate about work and flexibility, and a disturbing number of people seem to have Stockholm syndrome. Only yesterday I read a piece in Fortune magazine entitled: “Want to work 9-to-5? Good luck building a career”. The concept of work/life balance has “become emblematic of a woke work environment – one that acknowledges that an employee base is composed of actual humans, often with spouses, children and outside interests”, said the writer. God forbid!

Climate engineering sounds scary. But is coming whether we like it or not, this scientist says

The realities of climate change are front-page news every day. Temperature records are being smashed. Wildfires are raging. There is no sign of things going back to “normal”. If anything, they will only get worse.

Last year, when the planet was convulsing with the arrival of a pandemic, we pinned our hopes on technology – in the form of an mRNA vaccine – getting us out of our crisis. The vaccine was a technological intervention, injected into the arms of billions of people. Could we (should we?) look to technological solutions to our climate crisis, too?

Those who catastrophise about the fate of smaller parties within coalitions may be betraying their southern perspective

At the press conference to announce the SNP’s landmark cooperation agreement with the Scottish Greens, Nicola Sturgeon could scarcely contain her glee. And no wonder. What better way to burnish her government’s environmental credentials at the UN climate conference, Cop26, in Glasgow than to trumpet its willingness to engage in “grownup politics” for the betterment of the planet?

In Westminster, Boris Johnson is struggling. Earlier this month, a new climate breakdown report reinforced the severity of the crisis. Yet civil servants fear he has left it too late to push the world’s worst polluters to cut their greenhouse gases in order to meet the Paris agreement’s goal of limiting global warming to 1.5C above pre-industrial levels. Having initially refused to give Sturgeon a seat at the Cop26 negotiating table, the prime minister must be spitting feathers at the way she has turned the spotlight on her government at his expense.

26 August 1970: Government agency questions whether ‘greenhouse’ effect from the burning of fossil fuels will raise the Earth’s temperature

Too much fuss is being made about the fashionable word “pollution,” says the government agency which has been keeping an eye on it since 1863. The Chief Alkali Inspector, Mr FE Ireland, who published his annual report yesterday, says: “We must beware the obvious danger that emotions could be roused to the point of overriding common sense. This is not a problem to be tackled in a spirit of panic and those prophets of doom who predict the more bizarre kind of human catastrophe and paint rather self-righteous pictures of scientists as irresponsible villains exploiting humanity to the point of disaster could well be doing their (and our) cause a great disservice.”

Related: Sixty years of climate change warnings: the signs that were missed (and ignored)

‘Eco-friendly’ lights found to be worse than sodium ones – but both contribute to insect decline, says study

“Eco-friendly” LED streetlights produce even worse light pollution for insects than the traditional sodium bulbs they are replacing, a study has found.

The abundance of moth caterpillars in hedgerows by rural roads in England was 52% lower under LED lights and 41% lower under sodium lights when compared with nearby unlit areas.

Extinction Rebellion protesters have blocked Oxford Circus in London, the site of one of its most famous occupations, as women took the lead on the third day of its latest campaign of UK protest.

Police charged into the road to seize the group's structure and were then surrounded by female protesters. Women who spoke to the Guardian claimed officers trampled them as they rushed to secure their cordon

• Extinction Rebellion protesters block Oxford Circus in London

From crowd favourites to more unusual picks, these are the birds Australians are flocking to nominate

• Bird of the year: nominate your favourite for the shortlist
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Budding birders are flocking to nominate their favourite feathered friends for Guardian/BirdLife Australia’s 2021 Bird of the Year.

“I find this groundswell and outpouring of love for our birds really heartwarming,” says Sean Dooley from BirdLife Australia.

Female activists claim police officers trampled them as they rushed to secure cordon

Extinction Rebellion protesters have blocked Oxford Circus in London, the site of one of its most famous occupations, as women took the lead on the third day of its latest campaign of UK protest.

Just before 2pm, protesters swarmed into the middle of the intersection between Regent Street and Oxford Street, London’s busiest shopping district, and erected a pink structure and sound system.

Statement calling for significant cut in antimicrobial drug usage is ‘real missed opportunity’, say critics

Animal health experts and UN leaders have called for a significant reduction in antimicrobial drug usage in food animals, which is already causing a “silent pandemic”.

But critics say the statement is “a real missed opportunity”, pointing to its failure to set reduction targets or even call for a ban on the use of antibiotics for animal growth promotion.

It’s not enough for Greens to have bold ideas, to deliver them we need to be in power. This deal could be a turning point

• Caroline Lucas is the Green MP for Brighton Pavilion

No one gets into politics to be in opposition for ever, especially people in a hurry. And the Greens have every reason to hurry. We believe other parties have neither the ideas nor the resolve to handle the interlocking crises we face. Crucially, we understand that – as the environmentalist Bill McKibben once said – “winning slowly is the same as losing”.

The impacts of the climate emergency that we feared might occur in the second half of this century are happening now. But the other parties are still only prepared to tinker around the edges of what is needed. The British government’s policies on the climate emergency and the biodiversity crisis fall far short of what’s needed to avert environmental breakdown or mass extinction.

By boosting dominant species such as great tits, human-provided food can make life harder for many woodland birds

Feeding birds is hard-wired into our national psyche. The apocryphal Victorian “tuppence a bag” for seed for the Trafalgar Square pigeons has morphed into a national pastime, with an estimated 17m households spending £250m a year on more than 150,000 tonnes of bird feed – enough to feed the entire breeding population of the 10 most common feeder-using bird species year-round three times over.

The habit has been enthusiastically encouraged by environmental NGOs, which recognise it as a way for people to connect with nature. This was brought into sharp relief during the pandemic, with many of us discovering the joy of attracting birds to our own gardens after losing access to wildlife and wild spaces. So we know that bird-feeding can be good for humans, but what about for birds?

Our climate is in crisis, but authoritarians and technocrats don’t have the answers

What the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change’s report confirmed this month is that the stable climate many of us grew up with is gone and has been replaced by a fundamentally unstable one. Sea levels will almost certainly rise and storms will get more intense. Amid a drumbeat of depressing news and decades of inaction, there’s a sort of folk wisdom emerging that liberal democracy might just be too slow to tackle a problem as urgent and massive as the climate crisis. It’s an enticing vision: that governments can forgo the messy, deliberative work of politics in favour of a benign dictatorship of green technocrats who will get emissions down by brute force. With a punishingly tiny budget of just 400 gigatonnes of CO2 left to make a decent shot of staying below 1.5C of warming, is it time to give something less democratic a try?

It would be easy to look at the longstanding stalemate around climate policy in the US, the world’s second biggest emitter and embattled superpower, as evidence that something more top-down is needed. Yet the failure isn’t one of too much democracy but too little. The US Senate empowers West Virginia’s Joe Manchin – a man elected by fewer than 300,000 people – to block the agenda of a president elected by more than 80 million. Climate-sceptical Republicans, backed by corporate interests, have attempted to gerrymander their way to electoral dominance, halting progressive climate action in its tracks. The fossil fuel industry can engulf lawmakers with lobbyists and virtually unlimited campaign donations to sway their votes. And as the Republican party’s leading lights flirt with authoritarians like Hungary’s prime minister, Viktor Orbán, comprehensive bipartisan climate action remains a pipe dream.

They are blamed for damage to crops but numbers are falling due to predators and disease

The European rabbit (Oryctolagus cuniculus) is perhaps the most often seen mammal in the British countryside. It is also a favourite food for foxes, badgers, weasels, stoats and various birds of prey, especially buzzards, whose numbers often fluctuate depending on rabbit populations.

Yet the rabbit is classed as an invasive species. It was first imported by the Romans from its native habitat in the Iberian peninsula in about AD43. It did not thrive and was reintroduced again by the Normans before becoming established in England. It was so valued as a winter food source that the landed gentry had to have special permission to create a carefully guarded warren and the peasants were kept well away.

The government is launching a consultation on more reintroductions to the wild after a successful trial in Devon

Beavers will be released into the wild under government proposals to support a “cautious” return of the semi-aquatic mammals to English rivers.

The native animals will also be given legal protection in England, making it an offence to deliberately capture, kill, disturb or injure them, or damage their breeding sites or resting places, as part of efforts to support their recovery.

Some experts fear climate crisis is leading creatures back to area where they were hunted almost to extinction

Blue whales, the world’s largest mammals, are returning to Spain’s Atlantic coast after an absence of more than 40 years.

The first one was spotted off the coast of Galicia in north-west Spain in 2017 by Bruno Díaz, a marine biologist who is head of the Bottlenose Dolphin Research Institute in O Grove, Galicia.

Activists say the bank, which handles government tax accounts, gives billions in funding to fossil fuel industries

Hundreds of Extinction Rebellion protesters have blocked Whitehall in a protest against HMRC’s links to Barclays Bank, which handles the government’s tax collection bank accounts.

On the second day of the environmental protest group’s latest campaign of protest and civil disobedience, activists from its Welsh chapter locked themselves together in the street in front of the tax collection department, stopping traffic.