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.