Up to 1,000 people will this weekend mobilise in an air, sea, and land search for missing R116 helicopter crew members Paul Ormsby and Ciarán Smith.

The black box from Irish Coast Guard helicopter R116 will be given to British experts today in the hope that they will be able to shed light on what caused Rescue 116 to crash off the coast of Co Mayo.

The State has recorded a huge surge in the numbers of corncrakes in Ireland for the second year running.

IN May, this column celebrated the extraordinary lifestyle of the red-necked phalarope. After years of research, ornithologists thought they knew almost everything about the strange ways of this little wader but they were wrong. A phalarope from Shetland has confounded everybody by travelling 16,000km on migration. It’s not just the distance covered which is astonishing but the bird’s destination.

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

A 4.0-magnitude earthquake, the biggest earthquake in Ireland since 1984, occurred 60km west of the Mullet Peninsula off the coast of the west of Mayo last week, according to the British Geological Survey.

RED-NECKED phalarope sounds like a piece of abuse you might hurl at an intruder.

ACCORDING to ornithologist Eric Dempsey, three red-necked phalaropes visited a site in the midlands this summer.

A RECENT visit to the magnificent Dingle Peninsula, on a day when there was a heavy swell in the Atlantic, illustrated yet again the sheer power of the waves that crashed into the jagged coastline.

A rescue operation is underway off the Mayo coast after a yacht ran aground.