DIARMUID, our youngest son, returned from the jungles of Bolivia last month. He brought home a guest. Some odd characters stay with us from time to time, but the Bolivian visitor, who is still here, is the strangest to date.

PEOPLE DON’T like starlings. They are noisy, aggressive and greedy. Their nests, often in the roofs of houses, are a total mess and they gobble up everything on the bird table, leaving nothing for the smaller birds.

IF THE Keep Britain Tidy campaigners are to be believed, there has been a 20% rise in the number of rats on our sister island.

HEN HARRIERS are in the news. As Gordon Deegan reported in The Irish Examiner last week, the developers of a €10 million windfarm in Co Clare have been asked by the Department of the Environment to incorporate measures to protect harriers.

AN INAUGURAL showing of Al Gore’s film, An Inconvenient Truth, took place at Dublin’s Screen Cinema last week.

TWO OF Europe’s greatest bird-watching spectacles are getting under way: raptors cranes and storks are converging on Gibraltar and the Bosporus strait before crossing the sea for Africa, where they will spend the winter.

THE FLORA and fauna of Lambay were surveyed in 1905 and 1906. About 90 species of plants and animals were added to the Irish list. Invertebrates, previously unknown to science, were discovered.

OUR jays, coal tits and stoats are deemed to be special. The Irish members of these species belong to unique Hibernian races and are not to be found elsewhere in the world.

ADULT CUCKOOS have left our shores and soon their youngsters will bid farewell to their devoted foster parents and head for Africa.

I LIVE beside the sea, where the arrival of the seasons is announced on the avian public address system.