Falcon fledglings’ inaugural flight watched by dedicated fans includes dramatic crash-landing

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A trio of young falcons born atop a 35-storey building in Melbourne’s CBD have taken flight for the first time, with the take-off captured on a livestream for the world to see.

The three peregrine falcons – two females and one male – fledged late last week, with the footage of their first flight posted on Instagram by non-profit organisation Bird Life Australia. The last falcon took flight shortly after 9am on Saturday for the second time – after returning to the ledge in a crash landing the day before.

Once escapees from the pet trade, Los Angeles’s feral parrots have become a vibrant part of city life, and could even aid conservation in their native homelands

A morning mist hung over the palm trees as birds chattered and cars roared by on the streets of Pasadena. It was a scene that evoked a tropical island rather than a bustling city in north-east Los Angeles county.

“It feels parrot-y,” says Diego Blanco, a research assistant at Occidental College’s Moore Laboratory of Zoology, nodding to the verdant flora that surrounds us: tall trees and ornamental bushes with berries.

Nervous reporter is chased across English countryside by baying bloodhounds, in what could soon be only legal way to hunt with dogs

Would you like to be chased by a pack of hounds? It’s a question often put to highlight the cruelty of hunting, because the answer would seem to be no. Or so you would think.

Yet increasing numbers of people are volunteering to be chased across the countryside by baying bloodhounds in what could soon be the only legal way to hunt with dogs in England and Wales, rather than pursuing animals or their scents.

‘If you wouldn’t mind,’ the instructor says, handing out legal documents to all those who enter, ‘signing your life away’

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In the backblocks of the Lockyer Valley, more than an hour’s drive west of Brisbane, is a dead end track thick with scrubby eucalypt regrowth.

It is a Saturday morning in late spring and, in this quiet neck of an area which bills itself as Australia’s salad bowl, a car turns down the no through road. One follows another.

Marine Mammal Center in Morro Bay and local harbor patrol teamed up for mission to reunite pup with its mother

It was a foggy October afternoon on the central California coast when the Marine Mammal Center got a call on their public hotline: there were distressed cries coming from the frigid waters in Morro Bay.

The center’s experts were able to determine that the calls – which sounded almost like a human baby screeching – were coming from a roughly two-week-old sea otter pup that had been separated from its mother.

The country’s government is upbeat about the economic prospects of the growing number of windfarms, solar parks and industrial complexes but others warn of ‘green colonialism’

For generations, Alfonso Campos’s family has raised sheep in the grasslands of San Gregorio, a tranquil area in Magallanes province, in the far south of Chile’s Patagonia region. Now, he says, his farm will be encircled by three massive containers of ammonia, a desalination plant, a hydrogen plant, gas pipelines and hundreds of wind turbines.

“If the ammonia leaks, it will poison everything,” he says. “The noise of the windmills will also upset the animals, and the landscape will be turned into an industrial desert.”

The best of this week’s wildlife photographs from around the world

Charvet Drucker captures dramatic video and photos of seal being hunted by orcas in Salish Sea, north-west of Seattle

A wildlife photographer on a whale-watching trip in waters off Seattle captured dramatic video and photos of a pod of killer whales hunting a seal that survived only by clambering on to the stern of her boat.

Charvet Drucker was on a rented 20ft (6 metre) boat near her home on an island in the Salish Sea about 40 miles north-west of Seattle when she spotted a pod of at least eight killer whales, also known as orcas.

Study estimates 53,000 females have died on South Georgia since 2023, with ‘dramatic impact’ on future of the species

Bird flu has wiped out half of South Georgia’s breeding elephant seals, according to a study that warns of “serious implications” for the future of the species.

The remote island in the South Atlantic Ocean is home to the world’s largest southern elephant seal population. Researchers estimate 53,000 females died after bird flu hit in 2023.

Zookeepers at Paradise Park in Hayle decide not to attempt to bring bird home after 120-mile flight over Channel

Zookeepers in Cornwall have decided to grant an escaped flamingo what she apparently has gone to great lengths to attain: freedom.

Four-month-old Frankie took flight on 2 November, despite having her feathers clipped, from the walled garden of Paradise Park in Hayle.

Videos show schoolgirls fighting off animals, while others show people feeding bears, with some so realistic that users struggled to distinguish between fact and fiction

If a record number of fatal bear attacks wasn’t terrifying enough, experts say a torrent of AI-generated videos in Japan purporting to show people in close encounters with the animals is only adding to public anxiety – and could put people at greater risk.

While headlines about real attacks and disruption appear on a regular basis, monitors of online content are warning social media users not to be taken in by realistic videos on platforms such as TikTok of the animals attacking or interacting with humans.

Working with jaguars in Brazil’s Pantanal was a huge source of joy. But the wildfires are getting worse. This is Abbie’s story

Location Pantanal, Brazil

Disaster Wildfires, a number of years

Abbie Martin splits her time between captaining a boat in the Virgin Islands and doing research in Brazil’s Pantanal, a region that includes the world’s largest tropical wetland and where she founded the Jaguar Identification Project. Fires in the Pantanal have reached new extremes, killing at least 17 million vertebrate animals and burning 27% of the vegetation cover in 2020. Climate breakdown made the Pantanal drier between 2001-21, increasing the occurrence of above-average fires in the region.