The Guardian

The influx includes a newly discovered breeding colony of the nomadic and somewhat mysterious banded stilt

Tens of thousands of coastal birds have flocked to the outback after record-breaking rains filled inland lakes to their highest levels in three decades.

The influx includes a newly discovered breeding colony of the nomadic and somewhat mysterious banded stilts, on one of the lakes’ islands in the remote eastern Pilbara region of Western Australia.

Parks and Wildlife and Indigenous land and ranger groups have observed huge numbers of birds, including the mysterious banded stilt, flocking to inland lakes to breed after record-breaking rain events in Australia’s desert regions

Chemicals firm is using Brexit as a chance to seek further exemptions from climate policy costs

Anglo-Swiss chemicals firm Ineos is privately leading an industry lobbying attempt to avoid paying for the cost of decarbonising Britain’s economy.

Documents released under freedom of information rules reveal that Ineos is pushing the government to use Brexit as a chance to exempt the chemicals sector entirely from climate policy costs.

These powerful, and at times graphic, images bear witness to the plight of critically endangered Sumatran elephants and the challenges they face. These include the conversion of forest habitat to oil palm plantations, degradation of forest habitat by illegal logging, conflicts with farmers through crop-raiding, and being illegally hunted for their ivory tusks. While the situation is dire, the camera’s lens also finds hope in the efforts of those working to safeguard the animal’s future

Manchester airport A grounded traveller is distracted by the pied wagtails swarming over the terminal roof

The storm has mostly moved over, but its trailing coat still ruffles the air outside Terminal 1 of Manchester airport, and the backlog of cancelled and delayed flights testifies to its handiwork. With an unexpected three hours to kill, I leave the terminal by way of a first-floor access road, as the dregs of the day drain from the oppressively blank sky.

I am braced for boredom, but an incongruous flicker of movement stops me in my tracks. The sheer brazenness of the small, energetic bird as it hops around on the asphalt is startling but, before I can contemplate it further, another bird bouncing along a railing distracts my eye. Another, then another, and, before I know it, my eyes are attempting to join 200 or more restless black and white dots, each one a point of elusive energy that seems to flee my gaze just before I can settle on it.

Fancy looking a polar bear right in the eye, then swinging across the canopy of the Brazilian rainforest? VR is for you

I worry that humanity isn’t getting enough direct contact with the wild and we’ll all end up with Nature Deficit Disorder. Plus, how can you protect what you don’t love and haven’t experienced?

Greenpeace has been encouraging us to bear witness for more than 40 years. In the past this meant telexes sent from the ship Rainbow Warrior; now it means virtual reality (VR).

Rare only 40 years ago, farmed salmon is now taken for granted in our kitchens. But the growth of the industry has come at great cost

Every day, salmon farmers across the world walk into steel cages – in the seas off Scotland or Norway or Iceland – and throw in food. Lots of food; they must feed tens of thousands of fish before the day is over. They must also check if there are problems, and there is one particular problem they are coming across more and more often. Six months ago, I met one of these salmon farmers, on the Isle of Skye. He looked at me and held out a palm – in it was a small, ugly-looking creature, all articulated shell and tentacles: a sea louse. He could crush it between his fingers, but said he was impressed that this parasite, which lives by attaching itself to a fish and eating its blood and skin, was threatening not just his own job, but could potentially wipe out a global multibillion-dollar industry that feeds millions of people.

“For a wee creature, it is impressive. But what can we do?” he asks. “Sometimes it seems nature is against us and we are fighting a losing battle. They are everywhere now, and just a few can kill a fish. When I started in fish farming 30 years ago, there were barely any. Now they are causing great problems.”

Llanfairfechan, Gwynedd In their usual river habitat, these magnificent, large, hole-nesting ducks are shy and rightly so

Traeth Lafan’s wide expanse of sand is a landscape that draws you in, like the Elenydd moors or the high Arctic, through its abstraction. Nothing’s solid here; all’s sketched and coloured in shifting tones of water and light. Even history has become ambiguous, uncertain. These are drowned lands, their legends tide-steeped, wind-honed.

I come here for the birds, to which the fluid landscape accords a peculiar gift. Its bas-relief undulations, its distances, absorb and hide. What on first glance appears empty, on closer scrutiny teems with life. Though on this grey and turbulent day, with a flooding tide, little stirs. A couple of oystercatchers, heavy-billed, speed past. A little egret lifts out of a filling channel and braves the buffets as it heads back towards the old heronry at Penrhyn Point. In the stand of Scots Pine at the furthermost end of the promenade ravens discourse, shear down to the water’s edge, soar aloft with shellfish in their bills, to drop them from a height on the concrete sea-wall before folding their wings and swooping down to pick out the morsel of flesh.

If the Northern Australia Infrastructure Facility hasn’t got a risk policy yet, how can it be considering a $1bn loan for the Adani project?

We don’t yet know whether the $5bn Northern Australia Infrastructure Facility (NAIF) will be – as was alleged in parliament this week – a “slush fund” used to pursue the government’s “pro-coal agenda”.

But we do know some government ministers are absolutely determined to promote coal mining and generation – in particular the Indian conglomerate Adani’s $21bn Carmichael coalmine in Queensland – without a thought for how it will contribute to the global warming that is bleaching the Great Barrier Reef up and down the Queensland coastline and increasing the intensity of cyclones.

Alice Kohler shares photos and thoughts on her time in the Xingu river basin in the Brazilian Amazon

Alice Kohler is a Brazilian photographer who has visited over 20 countries during her career. In Brazil in particular she has travelled into some of the remotest parts of the Amazon basin and spent time with many of the country’s indigenous peoples, including the Araweté, Asurini, Guarani, Kamaiura, Karajá, Kayapo, Kuikuro, Parakanã, Pareci, Xavante and Yawalapiti.

An exhibition of Kohler’s photographs of the Araweté opens in Cusco in neighbouring Peru today, held at a newly-opened Amazon-themed gallery run by Peruvian company Xapiri. Kohler and Xapiri are holding the exhibition out of concern for the impacts on the Araweté and many others of the Belo Monte dam complex - arguably the world’s most well-known hydroelectric power project because of the opposition it has generated - as well as plans by a Canadian-headquartered company, Belo Sun Mining, to develop what would reportedly be Brazil’s biggest open sky gold mine.

Researchers at Utah University have captured video of an American badger burying a calf carcass in Utah’s Grassy Mountains. The images show the badger digging around the cow’s body, which then sinks into the tunnels below, before covering it with earth. It then returned to feed on it over the coming weeks. This behaviour has never before been caught on camera

• Can you dig it? Badger captured on camera burying cow
  

In an astonishing display of digging prowess, an American badger has been seen completely burying a calf carcass several times bigger than itself

An American badger has been captured burying the carcass of a cow – a previously unrecorded behaviour – in an astonishing display of the creature’s digging prowess.

The images were taken by camera traps set up by researchers who had left seven calf carcasses in Utah’s Grassy Mountains in January last year in an attempt to study which scavengers descended on the animals.

The birth of Britain’s first crowned sifaka, a type of rare lemur, has been filmed by staff at the Cotswold Wildlife Park. Yousstwo, a male pup, was born to parents Bafana and Tahina in December. The sifaka lemur is critically endangered in Madagascar, so the birth has extra significance

Orcas on the attack, bioluminescent mushrooms and a giant Australian cuttlefish are among this week’s pick of images from the natural world

The week’s top environment news stories and green events. If you are not already receiving this roundup, sign up here to get the briefing delivered to your inbox

A new study found people were less likely to want to become friends with those who confronted climate sceptics. How can we overcome these attitudes?

When does a social attitude become morally unacceptable enough that it is OK to challenge and confront it?

That is the question that motivated a new study conducted at the University of Exeter in which participants were given descriptions of people being confronted after expressing certain views. When the views expressed a disregard for racial equality, the confrontations were approved of. But challenging – even politely – a disregard for climate change was seen as carrying a social cost by the students taking part in the experiment.

Scott Pruitt denies basic science that we’ve understood for over a century

The current head of the US Environmental Protection Agency Scott Pruitt does not believe or understand long-known principles of climate science and basic physics. Recently he claimed on CNBC that carbon dioxide is not a primary contributor to global warming:

I think that measuring with precision human activity on the climate is something very challenging to do, and there’s tremendous disagreement about the degree of impact. So, no, I would not agree that’s a primary contributor to the global warming that we see. But we don’t know that yet. We need to continue the debate and continue the review and the analysis.

Seen from a drone’s eye view, the enormous earthmoving trucks, buses and tractors criss-crossing this corner of Somerset look like toy town models. The vehicles are dwarfed by their surroundings at Hinkley Point, where new footage has revealed the full scale of the site being prepared for Britain’s first new nuclear power station in a generation.

• UN asks UK to suspend work on Hinkley Point
  

Whaling fleet returns to port after slaughtering hundreds of minke whales, in defiance of moratorium on hunting and global criticism

A Japanese whaling fleet returned to port on Friday after an annual Antarctic hunt that killed more than 300 of the mammals, as Tokyo pursues the programme in defiance of global criticism.

The fleet set sail for the Southern Ocean in November, with plans to slaughter 333 minke whales, flouting a worldwide moratorium and opposition led by Australia and New Zealand.

Shrill carder bee and chequered skipper butterfly are among 20 endangered bugs, bees, butterflies and plants to benefit from £4.6m in lottery funding

Efforts to save some of England’s rarest species, including the shrill carder bee and the chequered skipper butterfly, from extinction are being backed by £4.6m in lottery funding.