Reasons for increase not clear but experts say it could be welcome sign marine ecosystem is becoming healthier
The Farne Islands off the Northumberland coast have long drawn fans of the natural world keen to catch sight of the resident guillemots and puffins.
But as recently as last week, another much bigger black-and-white animal has been delighting wildlife spotters. Orcas have been appearing more regularly than ever before.
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Breaking Waves: Ocean News
07/02/2026 - 00:00
07/02/2026 - 00:00
Wildlife at risk as demand for cropland and water grows to feed 50% rise in farmed animals, campaign alliance says
The number of mammals and poultry farmed worldwide has increased by half in the last two decades, research shows, and the amount of cropland used for feeding livestock has increased by about a quarter.
These increases are putting rising pressure on natural systems, threatening wildlife and plant species and adding to the climate crisis.
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07/02/2026 - 00:00
Poaching and wildfires have driven the country’s jaguar population to a critical level, and until now even rescued animals faced life in captivity. A new approach to rehabilitation could change that – but critics are unsure
A tentative paw emerged from a steel cage on to the sandy riverbed deep in the Bolivian rainforest. Then, another. Slowly, the female jaguar looked right, left and right again, as if waiting to cross a busy road. Then, muscles stiff from the long journey, it strolled away and disappeared into the undergrowth.
Yaguara had been in captivity since August 2024, after being orphaned as an eight-month-old cub amid Bolivia’s worst recorded wildfire season. As the fires raged, burning more than 10% of the country’s surface area, authorities handed the cub over to a team of veterinarians from the Comunidad Inti Wara Yassi (CIWY), a wild-animal rescue centre.
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07/01/2026 - 14:37
Many seabirds are starving to death as a marine heat wave lingers off California and fish seek deeper, cooler waters
Within minutes of walking on a San Diego beach, marine ornithologist Tammy Russell found the feathered carcasses – one after another.
Some were mixed in with washed up kelp. Others were under rocks.
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07/01/2026 - 11:31
As bird flu reshapes agriculture, small farms operate under strict rules. Just a single case could tank their business
Joshua Beebe often starts his day by cleaning the tires of trucks and cars entering his poultry farm.
“We spray them off and scrub them with a brush. It’s a precaution; the goal is to eliminate as many potential avenues for a pathogen to enter as possible,” said the owner of Tardif Poultry Farm, located in the Connecticut countryside east of Hartford.
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07/01/2026 - 10:47
Chief scientist says dangerous heatwaves, which are getting more likely, ‘bring home the implications of climate change’
The month of June was the hottest in England on record, driven by a searing heatwave in the final days of the month, which for the first time had red heat alerts for three days, according to Met Office data.
The Met Office said provisional statistics showed Wales and the UK as a whole had recorded their second-warmest June since 1884.
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07/01/2026 - 07:00
After a recent study found New Orleans is at a ‘point of no return’ amid the climate crisis, some locals say they will ‘only leave if forced to’. But what would it take to stay?
When a study in May concluded that New Orleans had hit a “point of no return” due to the climate crisis that would require people to eventually retreat from their storied yet ultimately doomed city, the local reaction was swift and fiery.
The onward march of rising seas around a sinking city was unsettling, but the study was “more focused on generating publicity and clickbait headlines” than coming up with solutions, said Helena Moreno, New Orleans’s mayor. There was flooding in Miami, and wildfires and earthquakes near San Fransisco, Moreno pointed out, “yet no serious movement exists to declare those cities lost causes”.
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07/01/2026 - 06:30
Theodore Roosevelt protected swathes of land, while Trump has lifted protections from more than 86m acres
Donald Trump will attend a ribbon cutting for the new Theodore Roosevelt Presidential Library on Wednesday, touting the legacy of a president his own administration is attempting to destroy, critics say.
While in office from 1901 to 1909, Roosevelt established five new national parks, protected swaths of land and passed legislation enabling himself and future presidents to proclaim historic landmarks and other objects of historic or scientific interest in federal ownership as national monuments.
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07/01/2026 - 05:00
The United States of America is … so many things, horrific and magnificent, good and evil, promising and cursed
The United States of America is a truck that has driven into a ditch. The United States of America is a program that has been hacked. The United States of America is … so many things, horrific and magnificent, good and evil, promising and cursed, as it approaches its quarter-millennium mark. I say it as though the US was one thing, but it is a thousand things.
It is the masked ICE agent shooting Renee Good as she stood up for immigrants, but it is also Good herself and the immigrants, and the streets of Minneapolis and their Dakota and Ojibwe Indigenous past – and present and future. The US before 1865 was slaveowners, but it was also the enslaved and the abolitionists.
Rebecca Solnit is a Guardian US columnist. Her newest book is The Beginning Comes After the End: Notes on a World of Change
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07/01/2026 - 01:00
The class politics of extreme heat are very real and very dangerous – but that doesn’t stop the billionaire press from peddling its agenda
Every time you think the idiocy has hit rock bottom, it discovers a new level. It turns out there’s an even deeper hole you can dig for yourself than climate-science denial: heat-stress denial. Across the billionaire press last week, columnists and leader writers minimised the health impacts of the heatwave, particularly in schools. Expect more of this next week, when temperatures are forecast to soar again.
An editorial in the Telegraph (which represents the newspaper’s view) titled “Hot weather alarmism treats the public like children” maintained that “unlike in the seventies, when people were largely trusted to look after themselves, officialdom now feels the need to lecture the public about the risks of hot weather at every opportunity”. Extreme heat warnings are issued and weather maps are “painted in an alarming red”. Outrageous! Instead of issuing warnings, the government should just trust people to “take the appropriate precautions”. We should all “learn to live” with it. Quite right too: whatever happened to the bulldog spirit of ignorance and needless death? Cricket, warm beer, excess mortality: these are the markers of national character.
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