A ccording to the country’s Cat Protection & Welfare Society (Catpaws), there are 1.5m domestic cats in Cyprus, an island with only 1.2m human residents. During a visit last month, 14 pussies converged on us at a cat feeding station near the ancient ruins of Amathus; they thought my wife was one of the dedicated cat ladies who feed them.

People, long ago, thought that the sun was a god. They weren’t far wrong

An army of counters has just visited all known haunts of migrant swans in Ireland. The surveyors were are participating in the International Swan Census, held every five years.

The names of literary giants and great philosophers spawn adjectives, ‘Shakespearian’, ‘Marxist’, and ‘Platonic’, for instance. Few scientific celebrities are so honoured, although ‘Darwinian’ has entered the lexicon.

Two botanical anniversaries occur in 2019. Twenty-five years ago David Noble, a New South Wales wildlife officer, abseiled into an unexplored gorge in the Blue Mountains and discovered trees from the age of the dinosaurs.

Take no risks, ‘do all the right things’, and you’ll lead a comfortable, but dull, existence. ‘Living dangerously’, on the other hand, yields ‘highs’ of excitement usually followed, alas, by pain and

The 1902 film Birth of a Flower showed hyacinths, crocuses and roses opening their petals.

The green linnet, alias the greenfinch, deserves such lavish praise; the male, in his green array, has bright-yellow wing-bars and tail-fringes.

LUGNANO is a municipality in Italy’s Umbrian region. Archaeologists, working in La Necropoli dei Bambini (the Cemetery of the Babies) there this summer, found the skull of a child with a stone in its mouth, writes Richard Collins.

Writing in the journal BioScience, Jeffrey Lovich of the US Geological Survey claims that 61% of the world’s turtle species are threatened with extinction.

‘While the train is in the station, please refrain from urination’ school-boys chanted to the tune of Dvorák’s Humoresque, writes Richard Collins.

A wind turbine in Europe or North America kills, on average, 2.3 birds and 2.9 bats each year, according to a 2012 report by the Netherlands Institute of Ecology.

Edwin Landseer’s Monarch of the Glen, the ‘biscuit-tin image of Scotland’, shows a royal stag with 12 points, or tines, on its antlers.

Do wasps become more aggressive from September onwards? With their queen preparing for hibernation, are they extra-protective of the colony? Food stocks might be running low. Hunger makes people bad-tempered; does it do the same to wasps? So, what’s the best way to avoid being stung?

We ‘fish’ for fish but we don’t ‘deer’ for deer or ‘rabbit’ for rabbits, says marine biologist Helen Scales in Eye of the Shoal, a Fishwatchers Guide to Life the Ocean and Everything, her latest book.

If our electricity came from renewables, instead of from fossil fuels, greenhouse gas emissions from vehicles would be greatly reduced.

Some people are notorious risk-takers, others are wimps. Do animals have similar personality traits? Seal expert Christi Bubac, of the University of Alberta, thinks they do.

“HELL is other people” declares a character in Sartre’s Huis Clos. According to Kaitlyn Gaynor of the University of California Berkeley, animals and birds are echoing that sentiment; they are shunning us increasingly. In addition to polluting and destroying their habitats, we are changing the behaviour and lifestyles of many wild creatures Gaynor’s team analysed the results of 76 studies on 62 species spread across six continents.

Our universe, it seems, came into existence in the Big Bang 13.7bn years ago.

In 1924, a stone with mysterious lines on it was found at the Kiik-Koba cave site in Crimea.

Although Mao’s crude attack didn’t succeed, tree sparrows are vulnerable, as their roller-coaster history in Ireland shows, writes Richard Collins

Mount Vesuvius erupted on St Patrick’s Day 1944, destroying several villages and damaging US air force bombers on the tarmac at a nearby airfield.

Technology created the problem. Can it do anything to reduce it? asks Richard Collins

In 1959, geneticist Dmitry Belyayev began catching silver foxes in Siberia. Keeping them in captivity, he selected the tamest ones and allowed them to breed.

The Beast from the East brought an unexpected gift; a brambling turned up in the mist net in my back-garden.

According to the law of entropy, change occurs in only one direction, writes Richard Collins.

Hunited for its meat on the steppes of Central Asia, the horse seems to have been domesticated by the Botai people of Kazakhstan five and a half millennia ago. The noble beast was revered even then; horse skulls were buried with their snouts facing the rising sun.

The grey’s arrival in an area spells doom for the local red squirrels, writes Richard Collins

During a 2014 field trip to Oregon’s Lake County, palaeontologist Gregory Retallack discovered fossilised animal tracks, writes Richard Collins

Over the next few weeks, hedgehogs will be awakening from their winter slumbers. The prickly porkers have slept, tucked up in nests of leaves and grass, since October or November, relying on their heating fuel, brown body-fat, for sustenance, writes Richard Collins

Crabs, the armoured personnel carriers of the creepy-crawly world, fascinate children, writes Richard Collins.

Today’s jet aircraft are 80% more fuel-efficient than those of the 1960’s, but aviation still accounts for 3.5% of human-induced climate change, writes Richard Collins

The bigger a bat’s ears, the better its hearing, is likely to be. But is it, asks Richard Collins

In 1842, Queen Victoria visited London Zoo, where Jenny, a female orangutan, made an indelible impression on her, writes Richard Collins.