A study of the 2023 Canadian wildfires 🔥 has concluded that drifting smoke caused a 3 per cent drop in solar power generation in Europe and North America, costing nearly $2 billion and increasing CO2 emissions 🧪 It's happening again this year, of course www.newscientist.com/article/2582...

Canadian wildfires are reducing solar power generation in Europe | New Scientist

Lost solar power due to smoke blocking the sun cost Europe and North America nearly $2 billion in 2023 alone

newscientist.com

“The study found commercial wildlife trafficking is the primary driver of the species’ decline, while Indigenous communities are often disproportionately blamed for the loss of wild cockatoo populations.“ As always. So many pet parrots stolen from the wild 😞

ARAA@araa.at · 2d ago

Some heartening news. Really great initiative! www.eurekalert.org/news-release...

My editor asked me to write about what happened to summer:

We launched a war on nature. Now we are in a climate warzone | Rebecca Solnit

Summer is not what it once was. We have been robbed of one of life’s great joys

theguardian.com

He cites users' ability to mute & block folks as a positive, which is good. It's also why right wing chuds thankfully can't get a foothold here - b/c they violate community norms & get nuclear blocked out of normal people's timelines. Bluesky isn't a *liberal* bubble - it's a *decency* bubble.

The Verge@theverge.com · 2d ago

Bluesky's new CEO Toni Schneider on the platform's reputation for being a liberal bubble: "Yes, we definitely want that to change. It is already changing. It certainly wasn’t designed to attract one specific group of people."

Naturally colonised Night Heron, Little Egret, Great Egret and Crane alongside resident Grey Heron are not enough, apparently, and cultural connections mean we should introduce another generalist predator into the last fragile refuges for Amphibians & reptiles. www.theguardian.com/environment/...

‘They’re part of folklore’: storks return to Derbyshire after 600-year absence

Conservationists are thrilled at the arrival of three juvenile birds at Willington Wetlands, hoping more will follow

theguardian.com

📢 ASSOCIATE EDITORS WANTED Join us! IBIS is looking for Associate Editors to join our editorial team and support the peer review process Read more and complete the application form: bou.org.uk/ibis/vaca... #ornithology 🪶

You know what? I don't care if this or similar acts are part of your 'tradition'. It's obscenely wrong and has to stop, period. www.bbc.com/news/article...

Scottish islanders refused permission to stage annual guga hunt

Each year hundreds of gannet chicks are killed for their meat on the uninhabited Hebridean island of Sula Sgeir.

bbc.com

This is a measured and damning thread from Sunder - you just have to continue reading past the first post which is obviously too much for some people.

Sunder Katwala (sundersays)@sundersays.bsky.social · 2d ago

66 seems a young age for Rod Liddle to die. Talented comic writer, insightful about football.obvs took much pleasure in transgressing political correctness But just lied when caught being much more indefensibly racist+ sexist online in his Millwallmonkey persona www.theguardian.com/media/2026/a...

Really cool paper from Niall Burton @bto.bsky.social in @bou.org.uk Ibis Validating acoustic monitoring for male annual survival, but colour-ringing and resighting gave higher detectability over the breeding season. #ornithology onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/abs/10.1...

Individual acoustic monitoring and colour‐ringing yield comparable estimates of male annual survival in a migratory songbird, but differ in breeding season detectability

Monitoring demography is key to understanding how species respond to environmental change; however, in estimating demographic rates it is important to consider any potential biases, for example throu....

onlinelibrary.wiley.com

Ray Harryhausen's stop-motion skeletons in Jason and the Argonauts are amazing even now. He animated the sequence by himself for more than four months -- without computers or even an easy way to check his work. We're looking into how he did it: animationobsessive.substack.com/p/how-ray-ha...

The first juvenile waders are arriving from their breeding grounds. How quickly do they learn to feed efficiently on shellfish and polychaetes? wadertales.wordpress.com/2026/02/05/l... #ukbirding

Happy International Owl Awareness Day! Please enjoy this photograph of ornithologist Herbert Brown (r) with an elf owl, the world’s smallest owl

Course you would, “love”… And Brexit will suddenly be amazing. And climate change will go away. And Trump will give us the bestest trade deal ever. And voters will love you for scrapping their rights, to please your moneyed mates… Now, pipe down and focus on your upcoming fight with a bin.

SERIOUSLY, WATCH THIS: If you really want to understand how SUVs and pick-up trucks have ended up being MOST of the vehicles out there in cities, and the absolutely HUGE consequences of that, watch this easy-to-watch video by Not Just Bikes. Then share it as much as you can. youtu.be/jN7mSXMruEo

These Stupid Trucks are Literally Killing Us

YouTube video by Not Just Bikes

youtu.be

Since Sep 2022, I've been building a website where you can find out who owns rural Scotland. Today I am publishing the latest update (July 2026) which contains ownership information on 5050 landholdings covering 5.9 million hectares (14.7 million acres) or over 77% of rural Scotland 1/2

The explosion of 'Asylum Seekers coincided with... Brexit. It wasn't a coincidence, Nigel CAUSED it. Are some people still this unenlightened and bereft of Critical Thinking?

“Those other countries around the world that we currently rely on to produce our food and vegetables, their climates are changing as well" As our harvests worsen and other countries hang on to what they have, we are going to get ever deeper in the sh*t www.theguardian.com/environment/...

Britain could face food shortages as drought continues, farmers warn

Wheat is half normal height, while England is seeing earliest ever harvest as farmers battle to salvage what they can of their crops

theguardian.com

Really good article about how peat restoration is helping farmers - a good counter to all the nonsense from the usual nonsense about "fuel load" and "rewilding" from the minority. www.walesfarmer.co.uk/news/2614875...?

Elan Valley farmer speaks out after devastation of terrifying wildfire

A farmer has spoken out after watching the land she calls home ‘burn’ and the restored peatland that helped save it.

walesfarmer.co.uk

Lesson of the week: try and live your life so that, at the end of it, you get a response like Bill Oddie, and not like Rod Liddle.

Most lowland woods in England are criss-crossed with drainage ditches, dug to help intensive forestry exploitation. Most woods no longer managed, but drainage still maintained for convenience of dogwalkers etc., losing ponds, bogs. Re-wetting woodland to buffer against droughts should be a priority.

Guy Shrubsole@guyshrubsole.bsky.social · 4d ago

Australia has a completely different set of ecosystems to the UK. In Britain, you don’t fight fire with fire: you fight it with water. We have allowed landowners to comprehensively drain our peat bogs, remove farmland ponds, riddle landscapes with field drains. Make Britain Wet Again!

Next year will be even hotter. I’m sure that predicting recovery on an ever-warming planet is a great strategy though. Choose your future! Choose hope! 🤣 www.bbc.com/news/article...

NatureScot has blocked this year’s Guga hunt 🙌 sparing up to 2,000 young gannets from being killed. But let’s be clear, this is not the end. The hunt was stopped because of conservation concerns, which means it could return when populations recover. https://leagueacs.co.uk/NtoqH @onekind.org

1/2 Spanish PM Pedro Sánchez is spot on: the climate emergency kills. With 180,000+ hectares burned in Spain, opposition climate denial from PP and Vox isn't just political games—it's dangerous negligence. Are we severely underestimating climate denial? #ClimateCrisis 🔥

‘Climate change kills’: Pedro Sánchez speaks plain truth to Spain’s deniers

PM has long history of speaking out on realities of global heating but political opponents remain unnmoved

theguardian.com

The 42,000-hectare megafire near Bordeaux proves climate breakdown is outpacing our emergency services. When a wildfire generates its own thunderstorm weather, suppression strategies become obsolete. Are we grossly underestimating this crisis? #ClimateCrisis

‘We stared into an abyss’: the men and women battling France’s megafire

Exhausted firefighters, foresters and volunteers wage ‘war of attrition’ against blaze that forced 200,000 people from their homes

theguardian.com

The "man of the people" branding really falls apart when you literally write yourself into the constitution as supreme leader. Wonder how many supporters will actually care though

fife4europe #FBPE #RejoinEU@fife4europe.bsky.social · 4d ago

Nigel Farage striking a top-secret deal to guarantee total control over Reform UK is classic. Nothing screams 'power to the people' quite like an iron-clad clause ensuring one chap holds all the keys while everyone else just claps on cue. 🎭

I hope the current devastation in the Cairngorms, Dunwich / Minsmere & across Europe convinces more people, especially birders to adopt a flight-free lifestyle,✅ to drive less,✅ to adopt plant-based diets,✅ to talk more about climate change✅ and to pressure govts to act!✅ #lowcarbonbirding

NEW: Who funds Nigel Farage? And why has it taken till now for any journalistic scrutiny? @carolecadwalla.bsky.social who has tracked him for a decade exposes how the UK press & regulators looked the other way 🧵👇

The warning signs are over: Australia now faces a devastating bird flu outbreak in wildlife https://www.europesays.com/health/20587/ The spread of H5N1 birdflu is worsening. At the time of writing, Australia has 53 confirmed detections in…

The warning signs are over: Australia now faces a devastating bird flu outbreak in wildlife - Health Europe

The spread of H5N1 birdflu is worsening.

europesays.com

Govt planning c. 100 new data centres by early 2030s, mostly in already water stressed areas. They have no legal obligation to disclose how much water they use. Meanwhile Govt launches £75m publicity campaign to urge us to reduce water use & privatised water companies waste 19% thro leaks. Madness

The penny drops. Climate change will break our economies. Fragment our societies. Undermine our governance. And erode our security. "Ecosystem services" are our life support processes. Destroying them destroys the foundations of human civilisation.

ECB official warns climate crisis poses growing threat to ‘core financial stability’

Exclusive: As wildfires rage across Europe, Frank Elderson tells the Guardian nature loss poses a growing risk to the global economy

theguardian.com