Have you ever looked closely at the head of a flatfish? Probably not, unless you are a fisherman or fishmonger. In Ireland, we generally like our fish beheaded; for many people, a fish is just a white fillet, or, in the words of the late, inimitable Keith Floyd, ‘an unidentified […]
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This month I was reminiscing with my friends over glass milk bottles and the little birds that would come and peck through the lid to get to the cream below. I couldn’t help but feel like, since then, we have been duped by the mass production of plastic and the […]
Climate change can have a devastating effect on animals that have spent thousands or millions of years adapting to a particular lifestyle. In Ireland, the weather is always changeable – an early spring might encourage birds to nest too soon, only for their chicks to be killed off by snow […]
This month, committee member and National Parks and Wildlife Ranger, Dave Rees writes about one of our winter visitors, the Brent Goose. One of the true sounds of the winter for me is the sound of a flock of Brent Geese quietly grazing on the edge of one of our […]
Animals often have misleading names: a white rhinoceros isn’t white, a black kite isn’t black. The common gull isn’t particularly common and the bald eagle certainly isn’t bald. A bream can be either a freshwater fish in the carp family or a member of two different families of sea fish; […]
Last month, in the article about marine plastic pollution, I mentioned animals called salps. Not everyone will know what a salp is. They belong to the Tunicata, a division of the Phylum Chordata – animals with spinal cords, which includes all the vertebrates, and us. The most familiar of the […]