John Bradsha, of Bristol University, quotes an Irish legend at the beginning of his new book on cats; ‘a cat’s eyes are windows enabling us to see into another world’.

CLIMBERS on Everest reported distant sightings of a ghostly human-like ape high in the mountains, a nightmare creature, the Abominable Snowman.

GULLS, the entrepreneurs of the bird world, start new businesses whenever opportunities arise.

A lorry carrying Stork margarine overturned on the A531 in Staffordshire, UK, when Britain and its allies were fighting Hitler’s Germany in the Second World War.

OLDER readers will remember the notorious Ne Temere decree, which discouraged Catholics from marrying outside the fold. Such unions are acceptable nowadays but a ‘matrimonia mixta’ in Virginia, Co Cavan, is raising eyebrows.

HUMANS have changed the composition of the Earth’s atmosphere and all of its oceans. We impact on 83% of the world’s land and have permanently altered a third of it.

DORMICE have taken up residence in Co Kildare.

EGYPT’S brief flirtation with democracy came to a tearful end. Regimes pay lip service to ‘the will of the people’, but it’s a principle ‘more honoured in the breach than in the observance’.

A FEMALE bottle-nosed dolphin became stranded in Co Kerry last year and was returned to the sea.

LITTLE terns began nesting at Crimdon, near Hartlepool in Teeside, in the mid-1990s.