I’VE just built myself a new garden pond.

A FEW weeks ago a pair of blackbirds built a nest in the hedge outside my conservatory.

THERE’S always something magical about that week in the middle of May when the hawthorn starts to blossom.

INTERESTING news from across the water – it looks as though Britain is about to gain a new species of mammal.

ON APRIL 23 Fisheries Officers on a routine patrol of Lough Derg on the Shannon came across a party of French anglers fishing for pike from boats.

WHAT makes deciduous trees and other perennial plants start to grow in the spring?

EXCITING news from a neighbour — he phoned to describe an unusual bird on his peanut feeder.

THE soil is beginning to warm up and it tempted me out to prepare a bed in the vegetable garden for sowing scallion seed.

Whatever the old Celtic calendar said about spring starting on St Brigid’s Day, most country people know better.

THE activity on and around my bird table is beginning to die down.