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.

The Rose of Tralee International Festival has dismissed suggestions it is sectarian after a Church of Ireland rector said his church has been overlooked to hold a service for the contestants during the annual event.

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

A 100-YEAR-OLD horse-drawn farm cart carried the last Knight of Glin to his final resting place in Co Limerick yesterday.

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

HE mixed in circles with the rich and the famous but Lord Thady Dunraven was far from being a “Lord of the Manor” in his beloved Adare.

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’

SENIOR clergymen in Tralee moved yesterday to resolve a continuing row that could affect services for 17 Alzheimer’s disease patients in the area.