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Charity advises replacing seed and nut feeders, where birds gather, with small amounts of mealworms, fat balls or suet
Garden birds should not be fed seeds and nuts over the summer months, the RSPB has said, in an attempt to reduce the spread of avian diseases.
Bird lovers are being urged to take down their bird feeders between May and October to help birds such as the greenfinch, whose numbers have plummeted after the spread of trichomonosis, a parasitic disease transmitted more easily when birds cluster around feeders in the warmer months.
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Brigg, Lincolnshire: The peas are in and next up are maize and wildflowers, but with our fuel use running to 50,000 litres a year, I have one eye on the news
Spring has sprung, and with warming soils we start planting our more delicate crops such as peas. With the chatter of skylarks in the background, we slowly drill our way across this 15-hectare field using a three-metre precision drill that carefully places the seed. Six weeks ago, this would have cost £7.50 per hectare on fuel, now it’s £15 per hectare – a severe shock to the farm’s finances.
It’s not often that an arable farmer’s mind is so focused on global events, but our fuel use tops 50,000 litres a year and the Middle East conflict is having profound consequences. Thankfully, we’re partly protected. Over the last seven or eight years, we have transitioned to a low-disturbance approach to establishing crops, disturbing the top inch only. This means less tractor use and healthier soil – a big priority here. Fertiliser prices are also a worry. Common practice is to buy a year’s worth every June, but prices are skyrocketing, and there’s no UK production any more to help us out.
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In a village in Norway, humans representing flora and fauna of all kinds meet to reimagine ‘nature-centric governance’
“My ask of humans is quite large,” says the northern bat to a room of reindeer, wolf lichen, bog, and other beings. “It’s a shift of consciousness, and an understanding that … we are a relation.”
The scene could come from a sci-fi novel imagining a more-than-human uprising. In fact, it’s from a recent “interspecies council” in Oppdal, Norway, in which non-humans – spoken for by humans – convened to discuss the region’s future.
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Campaigners say birds could die trying to access ancestral nests that were sealed during rail refurbishment
Some swifts returning to Britain to breed will be unable to access their ancestral nesting holes after they were blocked in a £7.5m refurbishment of a Derbyshire railway viaduct, campaigners say.
Nature lovers had appealed to Network Rail to unblock three holes which were among at least nine swift nesting sites on the twin viaducts at Chapel Milton, on the edge of the Peak District.
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New study describes what may be the first case of a unified community of chimps, in Uganda, turning on itself
On a June day in 2015, primatologist Aaron Sandel was quietly observing a small cluster of the Ngogo chimpanzee group in Uganda’s Kibale national park when he noticed something strange. As other members of the chimpanzees’ wider group moved closer through the forest, the chimpanzees in front of him began to display nervous behaviour. They grimaced and touched each other for reassurance, acting more like they were about to meet strangers than close companions.
In hindsight, Sandel said, that moment was the first sign of what would become a years-long bloody conflict between a once close-knit group of chimps.
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Residents of Fleetwood say continuous foul smell from Transwaste site is causing illness and making life hell
In the week that many families went to the coast for the fresh sea air or the tang of fish and chips, visitors to one Lancashire resort inhaled a rather more unpleasant aroma.
“Welcome to Fleetwood,” read the local newspaper headline. “The town that smells of bin juice.”
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This week’s best wildlife photographs from around the world
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Ludwig Koch was once as influential as David Attenborough is today – a new film by his granddaughter sheds light on a tragic event in the naturalist’s life in Berlin before he fled the Nazis
In his lifetime, pioneering German sound recordist Ludwig Koch’s heavily accented voice was as familiar to British audiences as David Attenborough’s is today. His tireless passion for capturing birdsong and bringing it first into German and, after his exile from Nazi Germany, British homes via sound books and BBC radio, made him a household name from the late 1930s onwards.
He was celebrated beyond his life, parodied by Peter Sellers (playing Koch observing life at a Glasgow traffic junction) and immortalised in Penelope Fitzgerald’s 1980 novel Human Voices, about the wartime BBC, which depicts Koch’s assiduous approach to capturing natural sounds and indirectly highlights how the organisation benefited from new voices like his.
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From California to Alabama, people of color are building communal spaces rooted in care and tradition
Zappa Montag steps outside his home to a thicket of redwoods, Pacific madrones and oak trees. Dozens of fruit trees dot the 76 hectares (189 acres), along with a large garden replete with squash, cucumbers, tomatoes, beans, corn and peppers. Nearby, a small stream runs through a valley surrounded by hills. At Black to the Land, the ecovillage in Boonville, California, Montag and five other Black people steward the land off the grid, relying on well water and powered solely by solar panels. The intentional community, as it’s called, is located in a rural area 115 miles (185km) north of San Francisco. Montag said it was an effort to “reverse-gentrify the country”.
Black Americans and Indigenous people have long gathered in intentional communities, defined as small groups of people who live in the same area based on shared values and a common vision. They come in many forms, including co-housing spaces in urban environments where people have their own units and share communal spaces.
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On Monday, a public inquiry will reopen, nine years after the plan was proposed and a toxic local battle began
When Fidelma O’Kane retired more than a decade ago from her career as a social worker and lecturer, she thought she would be “travelling and having a glass of wine and eating chocolate and reading books” while based in the quiet, hilly corner of rural County Tyrone where she has lived almost all her life.
It didn’t quite work out that way. Instead, an idle remark from a neighbour would set O’Kane on a path that would become an all-consuming mission. A mining company, the neighbour told her, was planning to drill for long-rumoured reserves of gold in the Sperrins, the low peatland mountain range in Northern Ireland where O’Kane’s family has lived for generations.
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