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.

THE title of Colin Tudge’s new book The Link: Uncovering our Earliest Ancestor is a little misleading. Our earliest ancestor was a bacterium which lived 3.2 billion years ago, whereas the book celebrates the fossilised remains of an animal which lived a mere 47 million years ago.

THANKS to two Irish entrepreneurs, the most distant part of France in now one of the easiest to reach, at least from Dublin.

IN 1752, the Emperor Joseph II opened the royal menagerie to the citizens of Vienna.

WITH the current gloom and doom it’s a relief to have something positive to write about. Bank accounts may be empty and begging bowls back in vogue but there’s prosperity off the north Dublin coast; the tern colony on Rockabill has broken all records.

SHOULD you, an environmentally conscious citizen, walk or cycle?

THE plight of the twite troubles ornithologist Derek McLoughlin.