I WENT ‘cage-diving’ with great white sharks off South Africa’s Dyer Island last month. The giant fish are lured to the boat by a smelly concoction of offal and the head of a large tuna, suspended from a line in the water.

SWALLOWS are still around but most southern migrants have left our shores by now. The wheatears from Iceland, Greenland and Canada, now passing through Ireland on their way to Africa, are ‘the last of the summer wine’.

Willie wagtail has taken up residence in a supermarket in England (Ken Kendall, Irish Examiner, September 13).

FRANCIS MACOMBER, in Hemingway’s celebrated story, is on safari in Africa. A male lion has been roaring during the night, keeping the wealthy American awake in his tent. The animal is tracked next day.

RAVENS, according to a study in the US state of Idaho, are changing their behaviour. These huge crows used to live only around mountains, desert anyons and sea cliffs. Now they are nesting on phone masts, buildings and steel towers.

AN unusual documentary film was shown recently in Dublin. Dinosaur 13 depicts an extraordinary series of events which began in 1990.

THERE’S good news on the wildlife front; BirdWatch Ireland has announced that terns nested very successfully on the east coast this summer. The numbers breeding ‘are at an all-time high’, says tern expert Dr Steve Newton.

ACCORDING to the cynics, it’s not what you know but who you know, which matters in life. This could hardly be true of the animal world, or could it? Surely, health and strength are the crucial factors in staying alive and reproducing successfully.

LAST month, during a walking tour of Béthune in northern France, our guide recalled the work of a Cork woman, Kate McCarthy, who nursed wounded soldiers during both world wars. Her niece, Sr Breda McCarthy of the Loreto Convent in Bray, told me this extraordinary woman’s story.

JARED Diamond, in his 1991 book The Third Chimpanzee, compared chimp biology with our own. Sharing 98.4% of their DNA with humans, chimps are more closely related to us than they are to the other great apes.