FIN whales are visiting the Celtic Sea between Wexford and Youghal.
ALTHOUGH Basil Fawlty made Torquay famous, he wasn’t the South Devon seaside resort’s most important resident. That distinction goes to someone who lived a very long time ago.
ABAR-HEADED goose visits our local estuary. It hangs out with swans, gorging itself on stale bread offered by local children.
THE solstice is a time to take stock and make new resolutions.
BOOKS make excellent Christmas gifts and last Monday’s Examiner carried recommendations from the crime-thriller, vampire and general fiction genres.
A CONFERENCE commemorating John Tyndall was held in Dublin last month.
IT’S a sentiment which another Harry, the regal male gorilla at Dublin Zoo, would no doubt endorse.
A CONSERVATION milestone was reached last week; two coveys of partridges, raised in captivity at Boora Bog in County Offaly, were released at a secret location in north county Dublin.
THREE-TOES, one of South Dakota’s most notorious outlaws, was easily tracked; having lost toes to a metal trap his footprint was recognisable.
IRISHMAN Des Tobin, the first scientist to grow human hair pigment cells in the laboratory, is professor of cell biology at Bradford University.
IN the August edition of Scientific American, Rachel Caspari of the University of Michigan claims that old people made a vital contribution to the early development of our species.
At its AGM last week, the Zoological Society of Ireland elected its first lady president.
A MAP on the EcoJel website shows locations at which people were stung by jellyfish this year.
THERE’S an interesting paper in the current edition of the journal Ringing & Migration.
TWO films, in which chimpanzees are the main characters, are being shown in Irish cinemas.
THERE’S an interesting paper on eider ducks in the current edition of Irish Birds.
THERE’S good news on the bird front; little terns seem to have bred successfully this summer.
NEWBRIDGE House, a fine 18th Century mansion in north County Dublin, was the ancestral home of the Cobbe family, whose ranks included an archbishop and a Lord Lieutenant.
NICOLAS VANIER is a French adventurer and filmmaker who was born in Senegal.
LYON’S airport is called after one of that city’s most famous sons.
IN 1859 two Irishmen, Robert O’Hara Burke and William John Wills, led the first expedition to cross Australia from south to north.
THE Royal College of Surgeons in Ireland hosted its annual outreach lecture last week.
DORCHA, our normally docile cat, killed two baby wrens this week.
THE Beast of Bodmin Moor struck terror into the hearts of the gullible in Britain.
CHINESE scientists have genetically modified 300 cows to enable them to produce human-like breast milk.
HEARING a magnificent dawn chorus this morning brought back an embarrassing memory.
THE Guardian newspaper in Britain recently reported on a row that has broken out over the future of a thrush-sized bird introduced from South America.
WERNER Herzog’s Cave of Forgotten Dreams celebrates a series of wildlife paintings.
AS Donal Hickey reported on this page last week, a sea-eagle has been killed by a turbine blade in Kerry.
MIDWAY ATOLL is a ring-shaped barrier reef with two small islands between Hawaii and Japan.
TREKKING in the jungles of Borneo has its privations.
“There are known knowns; there are things we know we know.
READERS will be familiar with ‘white -coat hypertension’, a rise in blood pressure triggered by the sight and smell of the doctor’s surgery.
ACCORDING to a report in the Polar Biology journal, a bear swam non-stop for nine days, travelling a distance of 700km through the Beaufort Sea, north of Alaska.
LIEUTENANT Commander Paddy Harkin, of the LE Niamh, reported that 100 orcas were feeding on mackerel 50km west of Tory on January 27 and 28.
WHO’S afraid of the big bad wolf? Just about everybody, it seems.
GOOD news on the environmental front comes from a most unlikely quarter; large areas of Iraq’s Tigris-Euphrates marshlands have been re-flooded.
DEEP in the rainforests of Sarawak lies the largest limestone cave system in the world. There is no road to Gunung Mulu, but this UNESCO World Heritage Site has an air-strip. The journey by river-boat takes ages so most visitors travel by plane.
THOUSANDS of red-winged blackbirds fell from the sky in Beebe, Arkansas, during New Year’s Eve celebrations.
HOUSE-HUNTING is off most people’s agenda right now; perhaps I shouldn’t mention so painful a topic.
I VISITED Newtownmore in the Caringorms, Scotland recently.
MEN don flattering outfits to disguise their physical limitations while ladies daub their faces with lipstick and creams.
MY local supermarket was crowded during the recent cold spell; people were building up stores of food.
BOOKS make ideal Christmas presents and, this year, the outdoors reader is spoiled for choice. Here are a few suggestions.
BIRDS visiting gardens are the only wild creatures which most people encounter nowadays.
HITLER mesmerised Germany and people followed him in their millions.
THE naked mole rat is not the prettiest of creatures.
THE mournful call of the curlew resonates with the Irish psyche, a reminder of ancient tragedies, the great famine or the emigrant ship.
THE red grouse, a relative of the pheasant and the farmyard hen, lives in bogs, where it feeds on the shoots of young heather.
CURRENT economic woes prompt memories of the cash-strapped 1940s and ’50s.
I VISITED the Cairngorms for Red Squirrel Week, courtesy of Visit Scotland.
STEPHEN HAWKING’S 1988 book, A Brief History of Time, surprised everybody by becoming a bestseller.
SO, at long last, the rogue Gulf of Mexico oil-well has been capped.
SOUTH AFRICA’S beautiful Garden Route is much travelled by tourists.
IT’S believed the lion that roars at the start of Metro Goldwyn Meyer films was born in Dublin Zoo.
RODENT lovers are over the moon – beavers are breeding again in Scotland.
IN An Enemy of the People, a village doctor discovers that the waters of the health spa are contaminated.
THE headline in the Dublin People declared “Locals Battle A Plague Of Rats”.
CUCKOOS, the first of the migrant birds to leave our shores in the Autumn, are packing their bags.
I WROTE last week about the battle of the sexes among phalaropes, little wading birds which used to breed in Ireland.
ACCORDING to ornithologist Eric Dempsey, three red-necked phalaropes visited a site in the midlands this summer.
BEE numbers are falling; honey producers, fruit-growers and farmers, all over the world, are worried.
THE corncrake, as everyone knows, is in trouble. Once common, this noisy little relative of the water-hen kept people awake at night with its rhythmic rasping.
STUDENTS sitting this year’s Leaving Certificate biology exam were asked: “Herbivores in an eco-system normally live longer lives – true or false?”.
BLUE TITS raised a brood in a nestbox at Wicklow Montessori School this summer.
THE Natural History Museum, closed for three years following the collapse of a staircase, has reopened in Dublin’s Kildare Street.
THE anthropologist Robin Dunbar visited Trinity College’s Science Gallery last week.
EACH spring, RTÉ’s Mooney Show sets up nest-boxes at locations around Dublin.
HOI An is a beautiful town near the mouth of Vietnam’s Thu Bon River.
IN January 2007, a strange bird was seen on the sea off Farnham in Yorkshire.
BAKEND Temple, on a hill west of Angkor, offers spectacular views of the setting sun.
THE blackcap was so much in the news this winter that it has become a well-known bird.
THE Greek philosopher Empedocles, who lived in Sicily, is said to have committed suicide by jumping into the volcano so no trace of his mortal remains would be found and people would think he was a god.
“AND they were both naked, the man and his wife, and were not ashamed’ says Genesis.
I TOOK my grandchildren to the Dinosaur Encounter, an exhibition attracting hordes of youngsters in Dublin.
ACCORDING to Andrew Hamilton and Emer Connolly, of the Clare People, customs officials at Shannon Airport found a pair of rhino horns on Christmas Eve.
THE Bewick swan is an example to us all; it’s one of the world’s most monogamous birds.
A STRANGE ghostly light can appear over bogs at night.
“THERE’S no bad publicity, except an obituary,” declared Brendan Behan.
CONTRARY to popular belief, the wren is not our smallest bird.
THE days just after Christmas used to be happy ones, but events five years ago changed all that.
PARTRIDGES, as everybody knows, frequent pear trees during Christmas, although no self-respecting one would be seen dead in a tree at other times of the year.
I TOOK my grandchildren to see Fantastic Mr Fox, the film based on a Roald Dahl story.
Richard Collins investigates the ‘see-ip’ call of this visiting songbird.
VISITING the woods above Glendalough last week, I came upon some of Ireland’s most elusive birds; crossbills were feeding in a spruce tree.
IN 1773, James Boswell declared that ‘man is the cooking animal’; no other creature, he observed, treats food the way we do.
‘DOWN came a spider and sat down beside her and frightened Miss Muffet away’ runs the nursery rhyme.
THE title of Colin Tudge’s new book The Link: Uncovering our Earliest Ancestor is a little misleading. Our earliest ancestor was a bacterium which lived 3.2 billion years ago, whereas the book celebrates the fossilised remains of an animal which lived a mere 47 million years ago.
THANKS to two Irish entrepreneurs, the most distant part of France in now one of the easiest to reach, at least from Dublin.
IN 1752, the Emperor Joseph II opened the royal menagerie to the citizens of Vienna.
WITH the current gloom and doom it’s a relief to have something positive to write about. Bank accounts may be empty and begging bowls back in vogue but there’s prosperity off the north Dublin coast; the tern colony on Rockabill has broken all records.
SHOULD you, an environmentally conscious citizen, walk or cycle?
THE plight of the twite troubles ornithologist Derek McLoughlin.
THE wildlife cameraman, Simon King, has been in many a tight situation.
IN HER book Wild Dublin, Éanna Ní Lamhna mentions an unusual visitor to one of the city’s parks.
THE Perseid meteor shower, known in medieval times as the “tears of St Lawrence”, occurs each year around now when the Earth passes through the tail of Comet Swift-Tuttle. The meteors are particles of dust from its wake.
VAMPIRES are evil spirits who force corpses to rise at night and seek out sleepers, whose blood they suck.
LONESOME George, the famous Galapagos tortoise, is described in the Guinness Book of Records as the world’s rarest living creature.
BOTOX offers the illusion of eternal youth. This dream substance, when injected under the skin, smoothes out wrinkles and forehead lines.
ENCELADUS was a familiar name in ancient Greece. Gaia, the Earth to you and me, was fertilised by the blood of Uranus and gave birth to children known as the Gigantes, one of whom was Enceladus.
EAGLES, hawks and falcons are the celebrities of the bird world.
WE are seeing an irruption of painted lady butterflies just now.
THE bird conservation equivalent of a school term report has appeared in Britain.
You can watch the antics of two blue tit families by logging on to the Mooney page on RTÉ’s website.
ON May 10, a massive stretch of pre-cast roadway, topped by a huge, steel spike, arrived by barge at Dublin Port.
I LED a dawn chorus outing last weekend. The venue was a forest with exotic trees and shrubs under the cliffs on the hill of Howth.
ZEUS, married to Hera, had a ‘fling’ with Io. For Io’s protection, Zeus turned her into a cow.
STOCKHOLM is the ideal destination for a weekend break; prices are about the same as at home and the there are budget flights from Dublin.
THERE’S no evidence that beavers were ever in Ireland.
ROE deer have sandy red-brown coats in summer and grey-brown ones in winter, but an all-white individual has been born on a Scottish estate.
IT’S changing-of-the-guard time on the Dublin coast this month.
Richard Collins on a death zone in Scotland for invading grey squirrels.
THE mother of the octuplets born recently in the US has her hands full.
GEESE were in the news recently for all the wrong reasons; the airliner that came down in the Hudson River flew into a flock of them.
THE songbirds of Europe are well studied, but some aspects of their lives are shrouded in mystery. Most small birds migrate at night, when we can’t see them; their flocks appear on radar screens.
WHEN a baby elephant, rhino or giraffe is born in Dublin Zoo there’s a huge response from the media.
THERE are two Charles Darwin anniversaries this year. February 15 will be his 200th birthday and, on November 24, we will celebrate the publication, 150 years ago, of his famous book On the Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection.
Richard Collins says slender-billed curlew may be Europe’s ‘Dodo’
RATS, it appears, have returned to Hamelin, 700 years after the Pied Piper banished them.
Richard Collins reports on the third Sack of Rome by noble winged knights.
TWITCHERS search out rare birds, keeping a list of every one seen.
Richard Collins on the possibility that the great spotted has bred in Ireland
Richard Collins says a new book dispels some myths about hedgehogs.
Richard Collins on how a Cold War crisis produced a wildlife miracle.
Richard Collins says this durable tree deserves better recognition
Richard Collins on how swans were seen in medieval England
Richard Collins looks at the role zoos play in saving the orang-utans.
Richard Collins on dangers facing half of the world’s frogs, toads and newts.
Richard Collins says breeding habits of gentle cetacean remain a mystery.
Richard Collins on the translator whose persistence solved a mystery.
Richard Collins on the mating and nesting habits of martins
Richard Collins asks what is the purpose of a zebra’s colouring?
RELIGIOUS people, the world over, go on pilgrimages and venerate relics.
Richard Collins on the wonders of France’s great untamed river.
Richard Collins wonders if puffins are becoming extinct or just migrating north.
Richard Collins says so far only two of 53 red kite chicks have perished in wild.
IRELAND has more than 6,000 lakes and, according to author John Dunne, we don’t appreciate them. They are, he thinks, a neglected part of our heritage.
Richard Collins looks at Darwin’s forgotten precursors
Richard Collins looks at Ireland’s part in the conservation of the European bison.
Richard Collins re-visits the Loire, a world of delicious food, castles, wine and wildlife.
Richard Collins on the arrival of the cattle egret on our shores.
Richard Collins says first newborn in 14 years had a textbook delivery
DESPITE being one of Ireland’s smallest counties and overrun by people, Dublin is remarkably well endowed when it comes to wildlife.
Richard Collins marvels at the swifts’ mastery of the Iguaçu Falls and the skies
Richard Collins travels to South America in search of an anaconda.
IN Leonardo da Vinci’s Lady with an Ermine, a young woman holds a long, skinny animal in her arms. An ermine is a stoat in its white winter coat. Irish stoats don’t turn white but mainland European ones do.
Richard Collins says some species of bird refuse to visit our little island.
Richard Collins on a pioneering mind almost lost to history.
HOLLAND is a popular destination for weekend breaks, the great tourist magnets being its magnificent art collections, the tulip fields and Amsterdam’s red light district.
Richard Collins on fellow members of the weasel family, the otter and the mink.
ADAM and Eve were expelled from the Garden of Paradise for eating the forbidden fruit of the Tree of Knowledge. Could we, their descendants, get back to paradise by doing the same thing; seeking knowledge? If we are to make the Earth healthy and wholesome again, we need to know how to do it.
Richard Collins on an amphibian that may provide the solution to diabetes.
NEXT Friday’s Mooney Show on RTÉ Radio 1 will celebrate the work of the legendary wildlife broadcaster David Attenborough. The great man himself will be in studio.
Richard Collins on the growing herd at the purpose-built elephant enclosure in Dublin Zoo
ACCORDING to Dr Ferdia Marnel of the National Parks and Wildlife Service, Ireland has a new wild mammal.
WHILE visiting the great dykes of the southwest of Holland last week, memories of a terrible event returned. Fifty-five years ago, this month, the worst natural disaster to hit Europe during the 20th Century occurred there.
Richard Collins sheds some light on why birds seem to have tricked nature.
Richard Collins on the big cat scare in the mountains of Munster
I RECEIVED an email this week about a mongrel swan in Cork. It came from an unlikely source, Maria Weiloch, a swan expert at the Gdansk Ornithological Station.
XAVIER METZ, a Frenchman, runs a cashew farm in Madagascar. While he and his family were walking in a remote area of the country last year, they came upon a strange-looking palm tree with its branches covered in flowers.
ROOKS, known as ‘crows’ in Ireland, are impatient birds; they can’t wait to begin nesting.
THE extraordinary transformation of Dublin Zoo, which began in 1994, continues apace. Last year saw the completion of the new state-of-the-art Asian elephant facility. Now, a landmark building is being restored.
Richard Collins delves into the poorly understood world of gut bacteria
JUST before the solstice, I spent a few days on the shores of Carlingford Lough. There was quite a good dawn chorus in the morning, to which the outstanding contributors were not the usual robins, but song thrushes. Although thrushes begin singing early in the year, the Carlingford ones were ahead of themselves, in full voice before the year had even turned. These fine vocalists have become scarce over much of the country but they seem to be thriving on the Cooley peninsula.
Richard Collins explains why there won’t be any more snow days in Ireland.
THE popular English carol, The Twelve Days of Christmas, mentions five kinds of bird and a tree.
Richard Collins finds out that humans aren’t the only animals to ‘pig out’.
ACCORDING to Wings, BirdWatch Ireland’s magazine, a new long distance flight record has been set.
Richard Collins is fascinated by the colourful habits of dunnocks.
STEPHEN JAY GOULD remarked that “the Irish elk was neither Irish nor an elk”. Although found throughout much of northern Europe, the giant deer was once the iconic Irish mammal.
THREE weeks from now, a most unusual birthday will be celebrated in Berlin; Knut, the city’s polar bear cub, will be one year old.
TWO books by well-known Irish naturalists have come to hand. One celebrates a river and the landscape through which it flows; the other focuses on a peninsula in Co Donegal.
Richard Collins shares his inside view as a juror in the competition.
IN 1933, a rare Tasmanian tiger was snared by a trapper. In those days, exotic creatures were sold to fairground operators who put them on display for money. This particular animal, however, ended up in Hobart Zoo where it was christened Benjamin by a journalist, even though its sex was never reliably determined.
LATE summer is a lean time for the birdwatcher.
Richard Collins explores the idyllic vineyards of the Languedoc.
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