It’s starling ‘murmuration’ time again. 

IT has been known for decades that migrating birds use the Earth’s magnetic field to navigate. 

THANKS to a verse in a nonsense carol, the turtle dove is a celebrity at this time of year.

Girls gain higher marks than boys in the Leaving Certificate exams. Women are better at ‘multi-tasking’, and their intuitive faculties, it’s claimed, are superior to men’s. When it comes to ‘spatial ability’, however, males are judged the better performers.

A cat among the dogs: leopard diet in a human-dominated landscape is the intriguing title of an article published in September by Vidya Athreya, an ecologist with the Centre for Wildlife Studies in Bangalore. 

According to tradition Richard Lionheart, returning from a crusade, brought the first mute swans to England. Later, the Normans took them to Ireland.

Rhinos are in the news and for all the wrong reasons. Suni, a northern white rhino, was found dead at the Ol Pejeta Conservancy in Kenya on October 17. 

FUNGIE, Dingle’s resident bottle-nosed dolphin, is Ireland’s most famous wild creature. 

A NOTABLE centenary passed almost unnoticed this autumn; in August 1914, the Endurance set sail for Antarctica. 

According to press reports, two traumatised lions have been moved from Gaza to a new home in Jordan. Let me apologise in advance for dwelling on the plight of animals when more than 1,200 people, including hundreds of innocent children, were killed in the 50-day onslaught on that beleaguered enclave.