I GOT an excited email the other day from a neighbour who was planting trees and saw a strange animal.

TWO hundred years ago the bean goose was one of the commonest winter migrant wild geese in Ireland.

LAST month, I visited Rathlin Island, off the Antrim coast.

IF you feed the birds in your garden you’ve probably noticed this is an exciting time of year because new species start turning up.

IT’S in the nature of the work I do that I get a lot of press releases, most of which are glanced at and binned.

A READER who regularly emails me with news updates about his local wildlife tells me that a nearby rookery has become very noisy lately.

THE common or garden swan, the mute swan, is one of Ireland’s most widespread and familiar birds.

I WAS in Denmark last week and one morning I got on a train in Copenhagen to make a personal pilgrimage that I had been promising myself for some time.

THERE is increasing concern about biodiversity losses.

THERE is a folk tradition, widespread across northern Europe, that at midnight on Christmas Eve all animals are given the gift of human speech for a few minutes.