At the Irish Raptor Study Group conference in Dublin last weekend, Sarah Hoy of the University of Aberdeen spoke about the goshawk, a bird of increasing interest in Ireland. 

WILLIAM Shakespeare was born four and a half centuries ago this year; he was baptised on April 26, 1564.

THOMAS BEWICK, the celebrated engraver, carved in hard woods.

AN article by Jim Fox in the current issue of BirdWatch Ireland’s magazine Wings, brings to mind a self-effacing bird which we have all but forgotten.

SILENCE, the movie by Cork-born film-maker Pat Collins, is in the cinemas at present.

BIRD-WATCHING in Morocco last week I encountered some magpies.

THERE’S an interesting paper on eider ducks in the current edition of Irish Birds.

THE red grouse, a relative of the pheasant and the farmyard hen, lives in bogs, where it feeds on the shoots of young heather.

PARTRIDGES, as everybody knows, frequent pear trees during Christmas, although no self-respecting one would be seen dead in a tree at other times of the year.

THE plight of the twite troubles ornithologist Derek McLoughlin.

Richard Collins says slender-billed curlew may be Europe’s ‘Dodo’