ACCORDING to the Examiner of June 26, the light died, last month, for the oldest known living animal.

Richard Collins finds an unlikely seabird on the Liffey.

THE BUDGET airline taking me to France charged for bags checked into the aircraft hold. This did not, I hasten to say, affect me as I travel with only a spare pair of underpants, a packet of Daz and a few cyanide capsules in case the worst comes to the worst.

IN A WILDLIFE equivalent of the Olympic Games, Irish animals would win gold and silver medals. The gold would go to the blue whale, for being the largest mammal ever to have lived.

I’VE LISTENED to dawn choruses in various parts of the world.

THANK God for the budget airlines; it’s so easy to travel nowadays and flying no longer breaks the bank.

JOHN MEDLEY WOOD was a 19th Century sailor turned farmer who became curator of the Durban Botanic Gardens in South Africa.

BABY emus have hatched at Stonehall Farm in Limerick. According to Sinead Shanahan of the visitor farm and RTÉ’s Mooney Goes Wild programme, this is the second year in which the birds have bred; a chick was born during Easter last year.

WITH A magnificent fireworks display and the popping of hundreds of champagne corks, Freedom of the Seas, the world’s largest passenger ship, left Southampton on its inaugural cruise last week.

IRELAND has several species of wild chicken. The pheasant is the most successful of them, but it’s not really an Irish bird.