The Guardian

RSPCA believes baby chickens came from commercial producer but were dumped by a third party

About 1,000 day-old chicks have been abandoned in a field. RSPCA inspectors said members of the public made the discovery of the newly hatched chickens in a field in Crowland, near Peterborough, in Cambridgeshire on Friday.

Many of the chicks are believed to be in good health, although some had died while others had to be put down due to their injuries, the animal welfare charity said.

Slufters Inclosure, New Forest This hardy specimen of butterfly has found an ideal basking site among still damp grasses in a bed of fern

On a bright, cold morning, sandwiched between days of rain and nights of frost, we explore Slufters Inclosure, an area first separated in 1862, when it was planted with Scots pine. It is 6C (43F) when we leave home but the southerly slopes here are harvesting the heat of the sun, and the temperature gradually lifts (just) into double figures. It’s enough to bring liveliness to a dormant scene and makes us wonder from a distance what we will find.

Hardly are we in when a dark shape shoots into the sky, does a looping circle around some upper branches and drops to the bankside. This battered red admiral is taking the opportunity offered by a brief change in the weather to soak up some warmth, and transfer it into energy that powers these airborne whorls, and may help to carry the butterfly through the chill days yet to come. A little further down the ride, we spot another, almost immaculate, Vanessa atalanta that has found its ideal basking site among still damp grasses in a bed of hard fern, Blechnum spicant.

The Minerals Council seems mostly intent on using its submission to electoral donations committee to kneecap environmental groups opposed to new mines

In 2010 the mining industry’s $22m campaign against Kevin Rudd’s resources tax helped bring down a prime minister. For years it has spent huge sums on donations and advertising and lobbying to exert enormous political influence. But the deep-pocketed miners really don’t like it when those with different views find the cash and the smarts to wield some clout.

The latest squeal came this week in an appearance by the Minerals Council of Australia before the joint standing committee on electoral donations, which seems likely to reach a bipartisan consensus on banning foreign donations to political parties and other organisations that might influence the outcome of elections – including associated entities (like unions or fundraising foundations) and activist groups like GetUp.

• Senate approves former Oklahoma attorney general 52-46
• Court ordered new environmental head to release emails to fossil fuel industry

Oklahoma’s attorney general, Scott Pruitt, has won Senate confirmation to head the Environmental Protection Agency, a federal agency he repeatedly sued to rein in its reach during the Obama administration.

The vote on Friday was 52-46 as Republican leaders used their party’s narrow Senate majority to push Pruitt’s confirmation despite calls from Democrats to delay the vote until requested emails are released next week.

Sea turtles laying eggs, buffalo and a swan lake are among this week’s pick of images from the natural world

Rodrick Ngulube was shot by poachers in West Petauke game management area, after rangers discovered carcasses of a warthog and zebra

At 7am on 12 February, 37-year-old wildlife ranger Rodrick Ngulube was gunned down by poachers in Zambia’s West Petauke game management area. Ngulube and fellow rangers had been tracking seven poachers since the night before when the incident occurred. The slain ranger is survived by his wife and seven children.

The sound of a gunshot the day before had set off the team of six rangers, including Ngulube, to track down its source. Forced to give up the search when it got dark, the team picked up the poachers’ trail again the next morning until they discovered the carcasses of a warthog and zebra.

Scientists have discovered the river reef is far bigger, and more important, than first thought – a biodiversity hotspot on a par with the Great Barrier Reef. Now they face a race to protect it from big oil

There is a flickering, bright glimmer of sky as the two-person submarine descends beneath the muddy equatorial waters to a place no human has ever seen – a vast, complex coral reef at the mouth of the world’s greatest river.

Thirty metres under the murky plume of the sediment-heavy Amazon, the sub enters a darker, richer world. A school of curious remora fish approaches the two-tonne machine. Crabs and starfish loom in its eerie lights. A metre-long amberjack swims past, then a two-metre ray.

Owners of more polluting cars will have to pay extra levy from October to drive within congestion charge zone

Older, more polluting cars will have to pay a £10 charge to drive in central London from 23 Octoberthe city’s mayor, has said.

Confirming he would press ahead with the fee, known as the T-charge, Sadiq Khan said: “It’s staggering that we live in a city where the air is so toxic that many of our children are growing up with lung problems. If we don’t make drastic changes now we won’t be protecting the health of our families in the future.

Mexborough, South Yorkshire No longer ‘more or less solid chemicals’, the gunmetal waters of the Don are clean enough for salmon

There were wisps of snow in the liverish sky over Main Street, Mexborough. I passed a shop offering cash for clothes, 40p a kilo, across the road from a tattoo parlour, and then stopped outside its shuttered neighbour. This was, from 1938, the family home of Ted Hughes. The poet’s parents ran it as a newsagent’s.

Great Winter Nurdle Hunt finds thousands of pellets used in plastic production washed up on shorelines around country

A search of hundreds of beaches across the UK has found almost three-quarters of them are littered with tiny plastic pellets.

The lentil-size pellets known as “nurdles” are used as a raw material by industry to make new plastic products.

Anti-establishment sentiment is surging to a record high—the question now is who will capture and channel it.

Believe Canada is immune to Trump-like conservatism? That the country could never be swept by a right-wing populist scapegoating the vulnerable, promising to bring back jobs, and beating the drum of law-and-order? Think again. The conditions for such an eruption are on stark display.

A poll released this week reveals a stunning lack of trust in government among Canadians—and a dramatic drop since Justin Trudeau came to power. No less than 80 percent think the Canadian elite are “out of touch” with ordinary people. 60 percent believe mainstream politicians won’t solve our problems. As in the rest of the world, it is no different here: anti-establishment and populist sentiment is surging like never before.

Knowing the rate at which the oceans absorb carbon pollution is a key to understanding how fast climate change will occur

As humans burn fossil fuels and release greenhouse gases, those gases enter the atmosphere where they cause increases in global temperatures and climate consequences such as more frequent and severe heat waves, droughts, changes to rainfall patterns, and rising seas. But for many years scientists have known that not all of the carbon dioxide we emit ends up in the atmosphere. About 40% actually gets absorbed in the ocean waters.

I like to use an analogy from everyday experience: the ocean is a little like a soda. When we shake soda, it fizzes. That fizz is the carbon dioxide coming out of the liquid (that is why sodas are called “carbonated beverages”). We’re doing the reverse process in the climate. Our carbon dioxide is actually going into the oceans.

Pristine Amazon rainforest and conservation areas are being rapidly opened up to dams, gold mining and soya plantations in Brazil’s least developed state

Read more: Amazon’s final frontier under threat from oil and soya

Pesticides, paving and higher temperatures have put huge strain on butterflies in cities over past two decades, finds study

Butterflies have vanished from towns and cities more rapidly than from the countryside over the past two decades, according to a new study.

Industrial agriculture has long been viewed as the scourge of butterflies and other insects but city life is worse – urban butterfly abundance fell by 69% compared to a 45% decline in rural areas over 20 years from 1995.

Egglestone, Teesdale Near the hart’s tongues, mosses clinging to the rock were becoming fossilised, encased in tufa

This section of moist, shady, wooded bank above the footpath, extending for perhaps 150 metres, is covered with the largest concentration of hart’s tongue ferns I have ever seen. This fern, Phyllitis scolopendrium, dominates because it thrives in calcareous woodland soils over limestone and the conditions here are perfect.

This morning, as I approached, hundreds of long, undulating, emerald-green tongues wagged in the breeze: if these plants needed a collective name “a gossip” of hart’s tongues would do nicely.

Rapid warming trend sees heat records in Australia outnumber cold records by 12 to one over the past decade

The heatwave that engulfed southeastern Australia at the end of last week has seen heat records continue to tumble.

On Saturday 11 February, as New South Wales suffered through the heatwave’s peak, temperatures soared to 47℃ in Richmond, 50km northwest of Sydney, while 87 bushfires raged across the state, amid catastrophic fire conditions.

William Happer, an eminent Princeton University professor, is tipped to become Donald Trump’s science adviser. Happer is a respected scientist in the academic community, but many are concerned about his possible appointment because of his stance on climate change. Happer argues that the role of carbon dioxide (CO2) in climate change has been largely exaggerated and argues that more CO2 is good for plant life and the planet

• Trump’s likely science adviser calls climate scientists ‘glassy-eyed cult’
  

Plan for pumped hydro project co-located with a large-scale solar farm demonstrates government’s ‘strong commitment to energy security’, PM says

The Turnbull government has given a $54m loan from the Clean Energy Finance Corporation to a large-scale solar development which it says has the potential for pumped hydro storage.

Malcolm Turnbull and the energy minister, Josh Frydenberg, have announced the government had directed the CEFC and Australian Renewable Energy Agency (Arena) to fund large-scale storage and other flexible capacity projects including pumped hydro.

Richard Higgins (Letters, 15 February) writes: “Farming is about maintaining the land in such a way as to support the animals and people who live upon it”. The late Tony King, professor of politics at Essex University, argued that all successful popular revolutions, good and bad, were accompanied by land reform and redistribution. One criticism of the EU levelled historically by the progressive, internationalist wing of the Labour party has been that the common agricultural policy encourages wasteful use of our common agricultural wealth. Max Weber, more than 100 years ago, showed that there was a relationship between the existence of large, capital-intensive farming estates and reliance on seasonal, immigrant labour.

When the inevitable leftwing reaction to this rightwing Brexit comes we would do well to consider how to reframe agriculture to involve a greater portion of the population and to ensure that a greater portion of our basic needs can be met at a local level rather than, as we seem to do at the moment, relying entirely on production for export and thus throwing ourselves open to the tempestuous nature of global commodity markets in the hope we can be saved by financial calculus alone.
Tom Muddiman
Southampton

My mother, Mary Welsh, who has died aged 88, inspired thousands of people to walk the wilds of Scotland and northern England and appreciate their flora and fauna, through her numerous books and published articles. While Alfred Wainwright guided walkers up high fells, Mary described walks that explored less visited lower slopes, moorlands and valleys, often covering three or four different habitats in one circular route and providing views of famed peaks from little-known vantage points.

Mary’s first book, A Country Journal: The Diary of a Cumbrian Naturalist (1982), chronicled her wonder as she settled into the Lake District village of Broughton-in-Furness, to which she had moved from Islington, north London, a few years before. Her last, Walking Fife: The Ochils, Tayside and the Forth Valley, was published in 2012. She wrote 38 books and 12 substantial booklets, which together sold more than 200,000 copies.