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.

I HAVE spent several days this autumn travelling on the Grand Canal in my boat.

FOR several weeks my boat was marooned by an engine breakdown on the Royal Canal a few kilometres east of Mullingar.