St. Patrick’s Day is, naturally, a special day here in Ireland… and is celebrated by Irish people and people of Irish descent all over the world. And while St. Patrick is perhaps best known for reducing Ireland’s biodiversity (thanks to him we have no snakes in Ireland, after all), let’s….

Great news for wildlife enthusiasts — sharks are back off the Irish coast. Basking sharks, the world’s second largest shark species, return to Irish shores every year around the same times as swallows.  Early sightings of these less well known but much larger harbingers of spring trickled in at the end of March from….

Yesterday was a special day. A lone, almost insignificant silhouette transformed the usually hum-drum task of dropping the car in to the garage into a wholly noteworthy enterprise. Elegant, streamlined, forked tail streamers fluttering in the breeze… the profile perched on the telephone wire was unmistakable: my first swallow of 2016. Seeing your first swallow of spring….

  Hanging out washing is an occupational hazards of working from a home office. Working from home invariably means I’m around when the washing machine finishes its spin cycle. And in most Irish households if the weather is dry there’s always one overriding  imperative: to get the washing hung out….

This column was first published in the Weekend Magazine of the Irish Independent on Saturday 04 February 2012. One of the things I like most about living in Ireland is the changing seasons. The tropics are over rated. Don’t get me wrong, a bit of predictable sunshine now and again….

Spring, it seems, has come early to Ireland this year. On Saturday the 07 of January I spotted a clump of frogspawn in a roadside ditch beside a small lake not far from the house. Frogspawn, in West Cork, laid the first week of January. That’s just nuts! Common Frogs….