Another Life: Michael Viney’s pick of the wildlife writing and photography of 2017

Ecologists push for a critical mass of cover, extending and merging existing clusters

A website to advise the surfers of the world had proved intriguingly reliable until now

Michael Viney: Declan Murphy’s engaging ‘A Life in the Trees’ the result of painstaking study

On walls and boundary railings of Lucan’s public park, 54 were counted on one visit in July

Another Life: Michael Viney on the Irish curlew’s staggering decline

Bored pigs can start biting each other’s tails. It’s not hard to enrich their lives

Wasp species common to Ireland are making much trouble for insects and birds in New Zealand

Michael Viney: We are extracting aggregates faster than the planet can replace them

Michael Viney: the lion’s mane jellyfish has been medically problematic for a century

Michael Viney: Sandhoppers are the most prolific animals in the ‘splash zone’ above the highest reach of spring tides, and scienti(...)

Genetic fingerprinting may be needed to trace the stonewort to the reedy channels of East Anglia

Michael Viney: We have never known about more species – and the list is growing

Michael Viney: Everything we know about how nerves work gleaned from squid nerves

Michael Viney: Stephen Galvin’s work established the long-lived yew as a reliable barometer of environmental change

Michael Viney: D’Arcy Wentworth Thompson belongs on the same shelf as Charles Darwin

Michael Viney: Is Roundup safe or carcinogenic? What about other herbicides?

The brilliant CB Moffat anticipated 21st-century avian population dynamics theory

Michael Viney: Hybridising habits and costume changes boost Ireland’s ‘Rosa’ roster

Another Life: New survey finds just 27 sites that fit the EU prescription for perennially vegetated shingle, almost all within spe(...)

The lack of such a map is to the detriment of good planning and landscape policy

There was an innocent time when one could just have thanked the sun, but that’s gone

The native oyster’s history tells both of a great loss from the coast’s ecosystem

The sight of sheep at a hedge got me thinking about animal curiosity

Michael Viney: You might wonder if any living thing sees Earth’s ‘true’ colours at all

Michael Viney: A blazing furze bush is a furnace of wildlife

Another Life: A relative of the goldfinch, the siskin is ‘the most joyous of birds’

‘The Hidden Life of Trees’ reveals a totally new insight and empathy towards trees

Michael Viney: Ecologists would leave them to nature. Teagasc and the EU prefer farming

Michael Viney: Rare plants and fauna are a feature of Ireland’s hard-water lakes

Michael Viney: It’s 20 years exactly since Egretta garzetta began breeding in Ireland

Michael Viney on Pádraic Fogarty’s ‘Whittled Away: Ireland’s Vanishing Nature’

Sea lettuce is a serious problem for tourism, aquaculture and seaside communities

Unnecessary changes to regulation could only have a negative impact on biodiversity

Most potatoes need up to 15 fungicide treatments. Could mapping their genome end blight?

Having survived in our seas for 420 million years, some species are now critically endangered

Edward Lear couldn’t have dreamt up the ingenuity of the drifting predator ‘Janthina’

Our columnist has been observing the local wreck for 40 years. Could it really be a medieval relic?

New research shows sea trout have more lice the closer they swim to salmon farms

The theory that this lofty Irish conifer became extinct has now been disproved

How urban blackbirds differ from their country cousins

From dormouse to whale, Ireland’s small but unique mammal community is doing well

Constructed wetlands promise relief from gathering floods and pollution of our waterways

Author Michael Conry puts pre-myxo rabbit numbers at 40m, with half killed annually

I would like to hang around to see final episodes of US’s bizarre rush into trumpery

A chronicle of Irish plants prompts reflection on grand floral designs not attempted

BirdWatch Ireland says impact of fisheries on seabirds is thousands killed as bycatch

No organism is more important than the ant to the complex ecology of our soil

With the sycamore taking over, it is time to get less random about what trees we plant

We used to think that eels sped to meet up in the Sargasso Sea for a single, springtime orgy, but it seems some are quite happy to(...)

Environmental Protection Agency’s latest report makes for a very sobering read

Decimation of nesting bird populations has prompted measures to protect habitats

Another Life: The €40,000 judgment for a woman who fell on the Wicklow Way, a strenuous hillwalking route, might trouble anyone wi(...)

Autumn in these islands is becoming a blurred and hesitant season, unmarked by anything so distinct as ‘the fall’

The venomous ‘jellyfish’ on European coastlines are not the passive drifters they seem

The prickly problem of thistle removal can result in a sore wrist . . . and much muttering

‘Anser albifrons flavirostris’, or the ‘bog goose’, long a traditional quarry of Ireland’s rural hunters, is now Europe’s rarest g(...)

Maps for seabirds, rain for grass and some shade for Earth: the many gifts of DMS

Their gossamer allows spiders to go ballooning, sometimes taking off in their millions

A reader’s report made me uneasy: choughs are deliciously wilful and wild; shall we see them tamed into pigeons by the Wild Atlant(...)

The digitisation of human life suggests at least a psychic transformation of the species

The US presidential candidates hopes a €9m wall will save his golf links in Co Clare. But nature might be more powerful than that

Dogs are catching ‘lungworm’ from molluscs infected with the potentially fatal Angiostrongylus vasorum. So many Irish foxes are in(...)

The unprecedented spread of misplaced plants and animals, transported through global human activity, feeds growing argument among (...)

A “red list” of Ireland’s threatened moth species finds about 16 per cent of our 500-odd larger moths warranting concern, with sev(...)

A preening blackbird, and concern about UV harm to Arctic wildlife

One study counted 118 insect species visiting hogweed, some for copulation. Such insect orgies are common to many umbellifers

The orcas that travel between Scotland and Ireland are fish eaters, even following salmon and mullet up the River Lee into Cork ci(...)

Examining the droppings of the pine marten tells us much about the animal’s biology and population

It’s hard to see the saxifrage as useful in terms of offering food or medicine. But it’s part of the peatland flora that soaks up (...)

Half a century after the first escapes from fur farms, mink are now seen across Ireland

Whether elderflower, blackcurrant, rhubarb or gooseberry, country wines livened up our social life in our first decades at Thallab(...)

In times long past, Zostera fringed every sheltered coast on both sides of the North Atlantic

‘Ecological clerk of works’ is an unfamiliar job title. But the clerks look after the discovery points on Fáilte Ireland’s coastal(...)

Episyrphus balteatus is one of many Irish species with bodies striped in black and yellow in hope of protective confusion with the(...)

The debate continues about the pros and cons of our most widespread climbing plant

The animals’ rooting can keep both plants in check. But its toxin means that too much bracken on its own may not be good for them

Ireland’s wildlife is a limited and tenuous network, much of it imported, in which the rabbit has an indispensable place

‘Storm-cock’ is an old, vernacular name for a bird imagined to predict bad weather

A bone found in Alice and Gwendoline Cave, in Co Clare, revealed that humans arrived in Ireland 12,000 years ago, a whole 2,500 ye(...)

For Ireland to have carbon-neutral agriculture by 2050, 1.25m hectares of trees need to be planted. What will it mean for our land(...)

Irish pipits, as I’ve watched many times, don’t hesitate to mob the hawk-like cuckoo at its teetering perch on a telegraph wire

While blackbirds and starlings vary their menu, crows like to bury a little snack for later

Research into getting badgers to eat drugs that counter TB has found they like chocolate

The English journalist and naturalist – this paper’s longest-serving columnist – has always been a keen-eyed yet sympathetic chron(...)

The wear and tear of tourist footfall poses a threat to seabirds of the northeast Atlantic

Caddisflies could take a prize for their variation of species

Major changes have been set in train by an invasive little vole and an alien shrew, with consequences for the barn owl

A bird that was once widespread in Ireland is returning

Refections on a life less ordinary by the stormy sea in west Galway

As climate changes, bringing both drought and floods, wetlands will be a moderator

Plastic litter that has ended up in the ocean is taking a special toll on marine life

Satellites can track fishing vessels, but enforcement of marine conservation zones requires patrol boats

Syn-bio provides cheap, standardised, off-the-shelf ‘bricks’ of DNA that build new forms of organism. But many fear it could get o(...)

Could whooper swans leave Ireland in a migratory change shaped over many years?

Green ideas make so much sense given the energy spent in transporting foods from every corner of the globe

The Shannon is Ireland’s wildlife heartland, partly because its floods have set such close bounds to farming

Some of the ingredients in your kitchen are rich in aromatic myristicin, which is a molecular precursor of MMDA, a drug similar to(...)

Living in remote areas lets you enjoy the clarity of night skies without light pollution