CONTRARY to popular belief, the wren is not our smallest bird.

THE days just after Christmas used to be happy ones, but events five years ago changed all that.

PARTRIDGES, as everybody knows, frequent pear trees during Christmas, although no self-respecting one would be seen dead in a tree at other times of the year.

NEANDERTHALS are on display in a cage at Warsaw Zoo.

BOOKS make ideal Christmas gifts.

I TOOK my grandchildren to see Fantastic Mr Fox, the film based on a Roald Dahl story.

Richard Collins investigates the ‘see-ip’ call of this visiting songbird.

VISITING the woods above Glendalough last week, I came upon some of Ireland’s most elusive birds; crossbills were feeding in a spruce tree.

IN 1773, James Boswell declared that ‘man is the cooking animal’; no other creature, he observed, treats food the way we do.

‘DOWN came a spider and sat down beside her and frightened Miss Muffet away’ runs the nursery rhyme.