THE conservation of nature depends on us knowing where the species are, the number of individuals and whether this number is increasing or decreasing.

WE’RE getting to the time of year when book tokens are in circulation, so I’m going to mention a few recently published books with an outdoors theme that I have enjoyed.

AT the end of the last Ice Age, animals and plants crept northwards to colonise the messy moraines left behind when the ice melted.

I HEARD an unmistakable sound — a wild trumpeting filling the sky.

PHILLIP O’Sullivan Beare wrote a book about Ireland while he was exiled in Spain following the Battle of Kinsale.

SOME years ago I was walking in a wood with my brother when we came across a badger caught in a snare.

IN 2007, the government finally gave way to international pressure and banned drift net fishing for salmon in Irish coastal waters.

RECENTLY in this column I wrote about the anomaly of having legal shooting seasons for bird species that are of conservation concern.

THERE are many species of oak tree in the world and quite a few of them can be found growing in Ireland — I have half a dozen in my own small collection.

MORE THAN 99% of documented living species are now extinct. Extinction is a natural and inevitable process that is compensated for by ‘speciation’, the development of new species.