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A student captured an image of a conservation team guiding northern bald ibis during their 2,800-kilometre migration from Germany to Spain. The photograph took first place in Nature's 2026 Scientist at Work competition.
New ScientistA photograph showing a conservation team guiding northern bald ibis during their annual migration won first place in Nature's 2026 Scientist at Work photography competition. The image depicts a passenger in an ultralight aircraft using a megaphone to sing to the birds as they fly over olive groves in southern Spain.
The birds, hand-raised by human carers, follow the aircraft on a 50-day journey covering 2,800 kilometres from south-east Germany to south-west Spain. Northern bald ibis disappeared from the northern foothills of the Alps around 400 years ago due to poaching and climate changes.
A conservation project begun in 2004 now works to re-establish a European population by guiding the birds to new wintering grounds.
Additional winning entries Other awarded photographs documented scientific work in marine and freshwater environments. One shows researchers installing an incubation chamber over a coral reef off Saudi Arabia to measure how different coral species respond to rising water temperatures.
A second image captures a biologist collecting a skin sample from a whale shark at Ningaloo Reef off Western Australia to study microorganisms living on the animal. A third photograph records scientists sampling water from an Ontario lake covered by toxic algal blooms for environmental DNA analysis.
A fourth winning entry shows an entomologist at the University of Notre Dame examining a yellow fever mosquito under a microscope as part of research into using a drug to control blood-feeding insects.
middleeasteye.netThe Lebanese environmental activist was injured two weeks earlier at her house on Mansouri beach and died Friday. She had protected sea turtle nesting sites for more than 25 years.
The IndependentExtreme heat, wind and drought conditions fueled multiple wildfires across the western United States on Sunday. An uncontained blaze in Utah prompted the evacuation of a small town southwest of Salt Lake City.
The Japan TimesFrance restricted alcohol sales at festivals and kept parks open overnight as temperatures reached 39-41 °C. Similar alerts covered most of Germany and parts of Italy and Spain.