The week in wildlife – in pictures

A seagull sits on a nest on a deserted beach in the French Riviera city of Nice, southern France on the 42nd day of lockdown in France.

An African penguin (
Spheniscus demersus) waddles along an empty sidewalk during the coronavirus lockdown in the Simonstown suburb of Cape Town, South Africa, on 25 April, World Penguin Day. The African penguin, also known as the Cape penguin, is experiencing a rapid population decline and is classified as ‘endangered’ by the International Union for Conservation of Nature’s red list of threatened species.

A dolphin swims in the Bosphorus by Istanbul’s Galata tower, where boat traffic has nearly come to a halt as the city of 16 million has been under lockdown since 23 April.

A bear sits inside its enclosure at Bandung zoo, in west Java. Indonesian officials said on 30 April that about 60 cash-strapped animal parks – home to roughly 70,000 creatures – across the archipelago have been closed since mid-March and most say they have only enough food until the middle of May.

People pass a herd of fallow deer grazing on the lawns of a housing estate in Harold Hill in east London, as
nature takes advantage of lockdown life in Britain.

A yellow-throated marten is spotted in a forest in Kathmandu, Nepal.

‘[our] nightmare : no / birdsong / the jungle was riven emptied / of [
i sihek] bright blue green turquoise red gold / feathers – everywhere : brown / tree snakes avian / silence’First verses of a poem written by Craig Santos Perez about the Guam kingfisher
which the Chamorro people call
sihek. It is among those featured on
the Living Archive, a multimedia platform that provides a space for people from Oceania to tell their ‘extinction stories’.

Two long snout weevil beetles mating covered with yellow pollen powder, in Waghausel, Germany.

Shorebirds take flight at the Merced national wildlife refuge in the central valley of California.

The Australian researcher and reef guide Jacinta Shackleton is now one of the few people to have ever seen the
rare and endangered ornate eagle ray. Shackleton was conducting research near Lady Elliot Island on the Great Barrier Reef when she saw the ray, something she said was an ‘unforgettable and emotional experience’. With little more than 50 sightings recorded worldwide, divers have nicknamed the ray ‘the unicorn of the sea’.

A Western honey bee feeds off acacia pollen at an apiary in Nagyszenas, eastern Hungary. The preparation of the bees for the acacia bloom began two weeks later than usual this year. Due to the late frosts, this season’s yield of Hungarian acacia honey is expected to be lower.

Bats cling onto the lower limbs of a banyan tree on the campus of Gujarat college to cool off because of the high temperatures registered in Ahmedabad, India.

Tetragonisca angustula is a small eusocial stingless bee found in central and south American countries. Seen here in Curridabat near San Jose, Costa Rica. The move to extend
citizenship to pollinators, trees and native plants in Curridabat has been crucial to the municipality’s transformation from an unremarkable suburb of the Costa Rican capital into a pioneering haven for urban wildlife.

A jay building a nest in Germany.

Baya weaver (
Ploceus philippinus) building its nest at Kirtipur, Kathmandu, Nepal.

Peter Lindel’s A Hare Dream was the overall winnder of the
2020 GDT Nature Photographer of the Year.

A female chacma baboon pays a visit to a house in Cape Town, South Africa. This picture is one of the
photographs of wildlife through the window by Guardian readers during lockdown.