Cities are home to a huge array of birdlife, but do you know your curlew from your godwit?

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Which bird – the fastest living creature in the whole world – has found a home in city centres across Britain, Europe and North America?

Hobby

Peregrine

Swift

Which tropical-looking bird, weighing just 4.5g is now overwintering in Vancouver, Canada, where winter temperatures can fall well below zero?

Anna's hummingbird

Tropical kingbird

Worm-eating warbler

Which exotic pink waterbird gathers in large flocks in the lagoon in the centre of Montpellier on the French Riviera?

Roseate spoonbill

Scarlet ibis

Greater flamingo

Which bird of prey is a common sight as it gathers in huge flocks over cities such as New Delhi, India?

Himalayan vulture

Black kite

Indian spotted eagle

Which globally endangered species of wading bird, of which there are fewer than 500 left alive, stops off in Hong Kong each spring and autumn on its migratory journeys?

Long-billed curlew

Bar-tailed godwit

Spoon-billed sandpiper

Which black-and-white waterbird – known as the "bin chicken", "dump chook" and "refuse raptor" – regularly raids rubbish bins in Melbourne, Australia?

Australian white pelican

Australian white ibis

Black-necked stork

America’s national bird, which species of raptor regularly nests in Denver city centre?

American kestrel

Bald eagle

Golden eagle

Which epic global traveller flies all the way from the Antarctic Ocean, to breed in the centre of Iceland’s capital, Reykjavik?

Bar-headed goose

Arctic tern

Wilson's storm-petrel

Which graceful creature, Europe’s largest wildfowl, is also Denmark’s national bird, thanks to a story from Hans Christian Andersen?

Mute swan

Whooper swan

Bewick's swan

Which pinkish-brown garden bird is known as the "television dove" in Germany, because of its habit of perching on rooftop aerials?

Turtle dove

Laughing dove

Collared dove

4 and above.

Pretty good: your bird knowledge is clearly a feather in your cap

7 and above.

Great bird knowledge: you're in the top flight!

0 and above.

Oh dear: bird-wise you're getting by on a wing and a prayer ...

Find more age of extinction coverage here, and follow biodiversity reporters Phoebe Weston and Patrick Greenfield on Twitter for all the latest news and features

From Kenya to the Seychelles, coronavirus has dealt a devastating blow to efforts to protect endangered wildlife

• How Covid-19 could push mountain gorillas back to the brink

From the vast plains of the Masai Mara in Kenya to the delicate corals of the Aldabra atoll in the Seychelles, conservation work to protect some of the world’s most important ecosystems is facing crisis following a collapse in ecotourism during the Covid-19 pandemic.

Organisations that depend on visitors to fund projects for critically endangered species and rare habitats could be forced to close, according to wildlife NGOs, after border closures and worldwide travel restrictions abruptly halted millions of pounds of income from tourism.

Once a step away from extinction, their survival was a rare success story. But groundbreaking gorilla conservation is now in peril

• Ecotourism collapse threatens communities and wildlife

As he clambers down the forested ravine, soil slipping beneath his boots, Dr Fred Nizeyimana knows they are close. “I can smell them,” he says, just before the mountain gorillas come into view high in the canopy, plucking leaves and chomping on the vegetation. An adult female slides down a tree, a flash of black fur and elongated limb. More follow, with infants and juveniles in tow. A grunting silverback descends to join its family, the branches buckling beneath approximately 180kg (400lb) of iconic primate.

Vital lessons about our mutual dependence will help us emerge stronger from the pandemic

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If ever a crisis proved that our fates are bound together, it has been the last six weeks. The state has asked many businesses to stand idle to save lives, firms have turned to the state as their guarantor of survival and workers have risked their lives for us all. When we have faced our toughest test for decades as a nation, it has been essential to pull together.

Yet we are only at the beginning of the need to recognise the mutual dependence between public and private sectors and our collective solidarity.

What’s needed after Covid-19 is a bigger, smarter state, with more devolved decisions, a greener economy and a stronger safety net

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The words are straining to come out. Boris Johnson hero worships Winston Churchill so it is obvious how the prime minister will pitch this week’s announcement of the plan to get Britain out of lockdown.

In late 1942, victory in the north African desert had suggested that the tide of the war might have turned but Churchill was cautious. “Now this is not the end,” he said in a speech at London’s Mansion House. “It is not even the beginning of the end. But it is, perhaps, the end of the beginning.”

It’s clear from a recent litany of disasters – from the coronavirus pandemic to America’s deadliest wildfire in a century – there are forces that cannot be domesticated

• Read an excerpt from the authors’ new book on the worst US wildfire in 100 years

About 12,000 years ago, human domestication of the natural world began in earnest with the intentional cultivation of wild plants and animals. Fast forward to today and our dominion over the planet appears complete, as 7.8 billion of us multiply across its surface and our reach extends from the deep-sea beds, which are being mined, to the heavens, where we are, according to Donald Trump, dispatching a space force.

Yet as has been made clear by a recent litany of disasters – from the coronavirus pandemic to America’s deadliest wildfire in a century – there are forces that cannot be domesticated. Indeed, our interference with the natural world is making them more liable to flare up into tragedy. We created the Anthropocene, and the Anthropocene is biting back.

The pandemic reminds me of a different invisible enemy. Once again, coordinated action is the only effective response

Deja vu. In recent days I’ve had that sense more than once. Every time I come home, remove my mask and wash my hands, I start thinking whether it is safe to keep on wearing the clothes that I had on outside. What if they are contaminated by the virus? Well, I can change clothes, but what if the particles have already jumped somewhere else, and are now in my home? Some would call it paranoia. I call it deja vu. I recognise those thoughts and remember the feelings.

That is because I first experienced them more than 30 years ago, in May 1986, on a trip to Kyiv, then the capital of Soviet Ukraine. It was a few weeks after the explosion at the Chernobyl nuclear reactor, and I was in the city – about 100km from the disaster area – on a business trip. We already knew that there was radiation in the air. Water trucks were spraying the streets, foreign students were leaving the city, and overseas broadcasters like the BBC were telling us to stay inside. But our own government was sending confusing and distressing messages: there is absolutely no danger, but make sure you keep children inside, and pregnant women too. Oh, and close your windows when you are at home.

Most Europeans support a universal basic income, yet young people doubt democracy’s capacity to deliver change

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The coronavirus crisis seems to be encouraging belief in radical change. An astonishing 71% of Europeans are now in favour of introducing a universal basic income, according to an opinion poll designed by my research team at Oxford university and published today. In Britain, the figure is 68%. Less encouraging, at least to anyone who believes in liberal democracy, is another startling finding in the survey: no less than 53% of young Europeans place more confidence in authoritarian states than in democracies to tackle the climate crisis. The poll was conducted by eupinions in March, as most of Europe was locking down against the virus, but the questions had been formulated earlier. It would be fascinating now to ask Europeans which political system they think has proved better at combating a pandemic, as the United States and China, the world’s leading democracy and the world’s leading dictatorship, spray viral accusations at each other.

Those two contrasting but equally striking survey results show how high the stakes will be as we emerge from the immediate medical emergency, and face the subsequent economic pandemic and its political fallout. What kind of historical moment will this turn out to be, for Europe and the world? It could lead us to the best of times. It could lead us to the worst of times.

After all we have already endured in 2020 we should know that stopping an emergency is far better than responding to one

In just a few short months, many more people in Australia have faced greater adversity in 2020 than in the decade since we emerged from the global financial crisis.

The bushfires that affected the health of millions, claimed lives and livelihoods, blighted our landscape and destroyed communities were unprecedented in size and intensity. Now the acute shock of the Covid-19 pandemic has also taken lives and left many more living in fear, while throwing hundreds of thousands out of paid work, shattering businesses and leaving us facing an unstable new world.

Guardian environment correspondent Fiona Harvey recalls being heckled at the House of Commons and explains how attitudes to climate have shifted in 10 years

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The shouted words rang out across the packed parliamentary corridor: “Fiona Harvey is the worst journalist there is. She’s the worst journalist of them all, because she should know better.”

They were the words of Lord Lawson, former UK chancellor of the exchequer, turned climate denier and now Brexiter, addressing a crowd of more than 100 people trying to cram into a House of Commons hearing on climate change. As listeners craned their necks to hear better, whispering and nudging, he elaborated at length on my insistence on reporting the work of the 97% of the world’s climate scientists whose work shows human responsibility for global heating, and failure to give equal weight to the tiny number of dissenters.

Editors from across the Guardian explain how they are putting the climate emergency front and centre

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The climate crisis is a story that reaches every corner of the world and on the international news desk our team of correspondents report on it from around the globe.

Guardian picture editor Fiona Shields explains why we are going to be using fewer polar bears and more people to illustrate our coverage of the climate emergency

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At the Guardian we want to ensure that the images we publish accurately and appropriately convey the climate crisis that we face. Following discussions among editors about how we could change the language we use in our coverage of environmental issues, our attention then turned to images. We have been working across the organisation to better understand how we aim to visually communicate the impact the climate emergency is having across the world.

Related: The Guardian's climate pledge 2019

A short glossary of the changes we’ve made to the Guardian’s style guide, for use by our journalists and editors when writing about the environment

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In addition to providing updated guidelines on which images our editors should use to illustrate the climate emergency, we have updated our style guide to introduce terms that more accurately describe the environmental crises facing the world. Our editor-in-chief, Katharine Viner, said: “We want to ensure that we are being scientifically precise, while also communicating clearly with readers on this very important issue”. These are the guidelines provided to our journalists and editors to be used in the production of all environment coverage across the Guardian’s website and paper:

Related: The urgency of climate crisis needed robust new language to describe it | Paul Chadwick

The Guardian’s editor-in-chief explains why support from our readers is crucial in enabling us to produce fearless, independent reporting that addresses the climate emergency

• Read the Guardian’s climate pledge

At the Guardian we believe the climate crisis is the most urgent issue of our times. And we know that Guardian readers are equally passionate about the need for governments, businesses and individuals to take immediate action to avoid a catastrophe for humanity and for the natural world.

Today the Guardian is making a pledge to our readers that we will play our part, both in our journalism and in our own organisation, to address the climate emergency. We hope this underlines to you the Guardian’s deep commitment to quality environmental journalism, rooted in scientific fact.

Today, we are making a public pledge to ourselves and our readers, that we are committed to taking responsibility for our role - both journalistically and institutionally - on how to impact the climate crisis we are facing.

If you’re gardening more than usual, try not to disturb the legless lizard, which can mate for up to 10 hours at a time in May

• Read more stories from our wild cities week

Under a small, sun-baked mat, a curled metallic-gold slow worm lies basking in the heat, the dark stripe running down its body revealing its youth. Sensing attention, it begins to wriggle away, revealing a companion, which speeds rapidly into the grasses in the opposite direction.

After a winter of social distancing, slow worms – a type of legless lizard that grows up to half a metre long and is often mistaken for a snake – have been venturing out of hibernation to enjoy warming their cold-blooded bodies in the spring sun.

Lockdown has allowed us a glimpse of how different our cities could be in a carbon-neutral world

• Read more stories from our wild cities week

“When a day that you happen to know is Wednesday starts off by sounding like Sunday, there is something seriously wrong somewhere.”

Never can John Wyndham’s opening lines from The Day of the Triffids have been quite so apt. My friends in London tell me that the heart of the city, like other great conurbations all around the world, is eerily quiet. It is almost as if a neutron bomb has struck, removing in an instant all signs of human life, while leaving buildings, roads and other man-made artefacts perfectly intact.

Pavement chalking to draw attention to wild flowers and plants in urban areas has gone viral across Europe – but UK chalkers could face legal action

• Read more stories from our wild cities week

A rising international force of rebel botanists armed with chalk has taken up street graffiti to highlight the names and importance of the diverse but downtrodden flora growing in the cracks of paths and walls in towns and cities across Europe.

The idea of naming wild plants wherever they go – which began in France – has gone viral, with people chalking and sharing their images on social media. More than 127,000 people have liked a photo of chalked-up tree names in a London suburb, while a video of botanist Boris Presseq of Toulouse Museum of Natural History chalking up names to highlight street flowers in the French city has had 7m views.

Waves glow turquoise in a glorious nocturnal display from an algae bloom off America’s west coast

• Waves dazzle surfers: ‘Never seen anything like it’

Social distancing rules will ‘kill cities’, experts warn – and the future of mass transit hangs in the balance

This is the second feature in our Life after lockdown series, which looks at how Covid-19 could change Australia for good

Before the pandemic struck, Sara Blazey made the same three-hour commute to work, three days a week, for the better part of 12 years. The 63-year-old family lawyer from the Blue Mountains works for a domestic violence legal advice hotline in Parramatta and it used to be that she would wake at 7am, drive seven minutes to Hazelbrook station and from there catch the 7.17am train to Parramatta before making the same one-and-a-half hour trip home in the evening.

With the pandemic, all that would change. Domestic violence support services such as the one Blazey worked for were declared “essential” services, meaning they could keep operating despite restrictions. To ensure they could do so safely, the organisation did what some commentators long thought impossible and began to transition its employees into working from home.

The Guardian investigates fire in the state of Pará - to reveal the loopholes that allow deforestation to be legitimised

We found the first fire without looking, crackling and roaring on farmland beside the busy Amazon highway, the flames consuming a road sign with its name – BR-163 – lying in the grass. Trucks thundered past, ferrying soya and corn from the agricultural heartlands of Brazil’s central-west to the ports of Santarém and Miritituba. Nobody was around.

Every year fires roar across the Amazon, and in just a few months they will be here again. But last August the number of blazes reached a nine-year high, and sparked an international crisis for Brazil’s far-right president Jair Bolsonaro. Months later, their traces hung over the forests in the Amazon state of Pará, leaving blackened logs and charred tree stumps where there was once rainforest.

Human cost of climate crisis will hit harder and sooner than previously believed, research reveals

The human cost of the climate crisis will hit harder, wider and sooner than previously believed, according to a study that shows a billion people will either be displaced or forced to endure insufferable heat for every additional 1C rise in the global temperature.

In a worst-case scenario of accelerating emissions, areas currently home to a third of the world’s population will be as hot as the hottest parts of the Sahara within 50 years, the paper warns. Even in the most optimistic outlook, 1.2 billion people will fall outside the comfortable “climate niche” in which humans have thrived for at least 6,000 years.

From making their own toothpaste to foraging locally for edible plants, more and more people are learning to cut the amount of rubbish they throw out. Here’s how they do it

Through my work, I have seen the huge amount of waste and recycling that we produce. Watching an incinerator for half an hour shocked me and made me want to take action. I was standing on a balcony wearing a full body suit and goggles watching gigantic grabbers emptying waste from trucks. The scale is so shocking and you realise how tiny we are compared to the amount of waste we create. I don’t want to contribute to that wastefulness and it has made me want to take action.

Tapirs in South America, hirolas in Somalia, hornbills in Indonesia, chimps in Nigeria, tamarins in Brazil and frogs in South Africa ... the ‘green Oscars’ recognise and celebrate the achievements of the animals’ grassroots protectors

The filmmaker’s latest venture is an excruciating mishmash of environment falsehoods and plays into the hands of those he once opposed

Denial never dies; it just goes quiet and waits. Today, after years of irrelevance, the climate science deniers are triumphant. Long after their last, desperate claims had collapsed, when they had traction only on “alt-right” conspiracy sites, a hero of the left turns up and gives them more than they could have dreamed of.

Planet of the Humans, whose executive producer and chief promoter is Michael Moore, now has more than 6 million views on YouTube. The film does not deny climate science. But it promotes the discredited myths that deniers have used for years to justify their position. It claims that environmentalism is a self-seeking scam, doing immense harm to the living world while enriching a group of con artists. This has long been the most effective means by which denial – most of which has been funded by the fossil fuel industry – has been spread. Everyone hates a scammer.

Marshwood Vale, Dorset: It began in March, when the buff-tailed queens emerged from hibernation, zigzagging from bloom to bloom

In the garden on a bright morning, with sunshine lancing the cherry blossom, my eye is drawn to the fat glitter of a queen bumblebee gathering nectar in the golden bowl of a tree peony flower. A black, almost velvety, body and rich orange-tipped rump indicate that this is a red-tailed bumblebee (Bombus lapidarius). Her wings shine as if newly waxed, while her tongue briskly probes a tassel of stamens. After a few seconds she’s off to check the next bloom – then airborne again, zooming over the wall.

Lockdown has replaced the background hum of distant traffic with the low, blundering drone of bumblebees. It began in March when buff-tailed queens emerged from hibernation, zigzagging across the lawn. Buff-tails are easily recognised by their size – the queens can be more than 2cm long – and their markings, two well-separated yellow bands and a brown-tinged tail-tip. Because they nest in holes in the ground, they are also called earth bumblebees (Bombus terrestris). The name is like an anchor, tethering a creature of sunlight, pollen and warmth to the chthonic darkness underground.

Only government action will preserve the clearer, bluer skies gifted to us by the coronavirus lockdown

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Many of us will have noticed differences in traffic noise and air pollution during the lockdown. Startling images have come from India where, for the first time in a generation, the Himalayas have been visible more than a hundred miles away. Something similar happened in the UK in 1921 when coal shortages during a miner’s strike led to newspaper reports of distant landmarks being visible as never before. In the UK we too have been able to look up at clearer blue skies, less impeded by air pollution and not crisscrossed by aircraft contrails. This helped Germany to break a solar power record.

In Beijing, air pollution controls for the 2014 Asia Pacific Economic Cooperation meeting also brought a return to blue skies. The term “APEC blue” emerged in Chinese social media and was nominated as Beijing’s top environmental phrase for the year. Later it took on a tinge of sadness, to mean something wonderful, but brief. One woman posted about love on social media, “He’s not that into you – it’s just an APEC blue!”

City leaders publish ‘statement of principles’ putting climate action at centre of recovery plans

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Mayors from many of the world’s leading cities have warned there can be no return to “business as usual” in the aftermath of the coronavirus crisis if humanity is to escape catastrophic climate breakdown.

City leaders representing more than 750 million people have published a “statement of principles”, which commits them to putting greater equality and climate resilience at the heart of their recovery plans.

Maroon 5 could have silenced their many haters with a spectacular performance. But they didn’t do that.

The 46-year-old actress is now revealing the agony she went through before receiving a diagnosis of multiple sclerosis (MS) last August."Ever since my son was born, I was in an MS flare-up and didn't know, and I was giving it everything to seem normal," Blair told Robin Roberts in an interview that aired Tuesday on "Good Morning America." "And I was self-medicating when he wasn't with me. Blair recalled that she would get so fatigued prior to her diagnosis that she would need to pull over to take a nap after dropping her son, now 7, off at his school one mile away from their home. During her interview with "GMA" at her Los Angeles home, Blair was in an "exacerbation" of MS, or an attack that causes new symptoms or the worsening of existing symptoms.

'Avengers: Endgame' tops 'Star Wars,' breaks previous pre-sale record originally appeared on goodmorningamerica.com"Avengers: Endgame" tickets went on sale Tuesday and just like Thanos' famous snap, they were gone just like that. But way more than half.Fandango is reporting that "Endgame" has broken its pre-sale records, topping the previous holder, "Star Wars: The Force Awakens."(MORE: New 'Avengers: Endgame' trailer features Captain Marvel, the battle to beat Thanos)Guess the force is strong with Earth's mightiest heroes. ...

Mike 'The Situation' Sorrentino Is 'Having the Time of His Life' in Prison

Iconic hip-hop producer and Alicia Keys’s husband, Swizz Beatz, isn’t afraid to tell his guy friends he loves them.

But Davis does see a path forward: empathy and becoming educated on one another’s experiences.

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The Cyclone helicopter was participating in a NATO training exercise. A Nova Scotia native died, and two others from the province were missing.

Prime Minister Justin Trudeau said the government had been in the process of introducing the ban when its agenda was overturned by the pandemic.

A health economist who has taught on both sides of the border examines the difference between Canada and the United States.

Sightings of the Asian giant hornet have prompted fears that the vicious insect could establish itself in the United States and devastate bee populations.

Los avistamientos del avispón asiático gigante han provocado temores de que el insecto se establezca en Estados Unidos y extermine a las poblaciones de abejas.

This six-bedroom house on the coast of Prince Edward Island sits on an isolated nine-acre lot. It is on the market for $1.67 million.

Canada’s smallest province remains one of its most affordable, despite a shortage of inventory exacerbated by the pandemic.

Whatever effect warm weather has on the coronavirus, it won’t be enough to safely drop social restrictions.

While researchers across Canada are among the scientists working on coronavirus vaccines, the country doesn’t have the means to quickly produce any successful result.

I support release of the Mueller report — ChuckGrassley (@ChuckGrassley) April 4, 2019