Wildlife areas on farms must be carefully managed as well as protected to support bees and other insect pollinators, a major study has found.

For those who enjoy encounters with flora, birds, marine, amphibian and avian varieties they don’t see every day, La Gomera, an island in the Canaries group, is a rewarding experience.

I see that a website describes the call of Canarian cory’s shearwaters as ‘waca waca’. It’s a mad, hysterical call, uttered when the parent birds arrive to feed their nestlings.

A paper published in Current Biology examines the extinction of a colourful little bird which, until recently, thrived in the eastern US. With the appalling environmental catastrophe enveloping Australia, home to 56 of the world’s 370 parrot species, this account of the Carolina parakeet’s demise is timely.

Time was when people in Ireland didn’t run to doctors and pharmacists with every ache. Instead, they had their own medicine drawn from herbs and plants.

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.

FIFTY seven Canada geese at Coolmain Strand and 47 Canarian ravens touring the sky above the blunted peak of the long- extinct volcano of La Gomera, in the Canary Islands — Garajonay, the volcano is called, for a pair of doomed lovers, Gara and Jonay, she the Gomera Guanche princess, who fell in love with the peasant boy, Jonay, from the island of Tenerife, 50km across the water, which he swam to reach her.

If the robin is the ‘Christmas bird’, then the snow bunting is the ‘white-Christmas’ one; its arrival here each winter is as irregular and unpredictable as snow during the festive season.

Flame retardants, pesticides and other pollutants are among the toxic ingredients found in four killer whales stranded on the Irish coastline, according to a new study.

A NEW survey confirms the presence of at least six rare spiders in Killarney National Park.

NAYA, a female wolf, arrived in Belgium in January last year.

Here, it was a chilly ending to October; there, on the Greek island which we left just 48 hours ago, it was a warm sea and a white beach and the infinity of space above us a cloudless blue.

THE European eel is in trouble. Its numbers have declined catastrophically since 1980 and the species is listed as ‘critically endangered’ by the International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN).

Anyone travelling the roads at this time of year will inevitably note examples of crude hedge-cutting. And the irony is that local authorities, which should be prime protectors of the environment, are often responsible for this.

With the changing of the clocks and the colder, darker days, it is understandable that some of us wish we could curl up in a warm place and do very little. Maybe hibernation wouldn’t be such a bad idea. Why do some animals hibernate while others don’t? Would humans be able to if we chose to?

Here in Syros, a small island in the Cyclades in Greece, I was ambling homeward at night after a memorable meal of kalamari (squid) stuffed with feta cheese, when I rounded a corner and was stopped as dead in my tracks as if I’d walked into a wall, the wall being the overpowering scent of afrangipani tree growing more than 50m away in the courtyard of our guesthouse.

By now, you have to look a little harder for them under fallen leaves but wild mushrooms are still on the ground and the picking season can continue into November.

Irish songbirds will club together to ward off hawks falcons or cuckoos, enemies much larger than themselves.

The EU has permitted the Irish government to introduce legislation restricting use of plastic microbeads to protect marine wildlife and the environment.

The DSPCA is warning people not to attempt to take selfies with deer in places such as the Phoenix Park.

According to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, lightning kills about 24,000 people worldwide each year. Apocalyptic thunderstorms occur when the gods were angry, or so it was thought; only during them do we mortals perceive electricity directly. Some fish, however, have no such difficulty; they not only sense the mysterious energy, but use it to locate prey.

It is being organised as a last minute appeal to South Dublin County Council to re-think plans to bulldoze an area of wild parkland to make way for new playing pitches.

The curlew is on the brink of extinction in Ireland unless the Government invests significant resources in protection measures.

Wildlife crime in Ireland is on the increase and deer are at huge risk, particularly in counties like Kerry, Tipperary and Wicklow, the Irish Deer Commission has said.

A new report on the status of our habitats and species paints a dire picture for Irish biodiversity and stresses the extent of the extinction crisis.

New research says seagulls are less likely to swoop in to take your food if you stare at them.

Gardaí have teamed up with the PSNI in an operation aimed at tackling fish poaching in Strabane.

The fastest sharks in the oceans find few refuges from longline fishing, according to an international study.

A father and son from Kerry made a splash in more ways than one when they posted video footage of their close encounter with a pod of humpback whales.