Paddy Sleeman

Of the many surreal images in the iconography of lockdown, for me the most telling was the trotting fox on a shuttered, empty Grafton Street. There wa(...)

Waking on so many days to human distress in droughts, fires, floods and storms, sometimes it’s hard to find proper concern for the rest of the natural(...)

Among the many indelible images of BBC’s natural history television, one could just as well have been filmed on our acre: a time-lapse study of plant (...)

This beautiful creature flew into our house recently. Orla Martin, New Ross, Co Wexford It’s the Irish damselfly, also called the Irish bluet, first(...)

In the spring of 1991 a major conference on the Irish badger’s link to tuberculosis in cattle gathered scientists, government vets and wildlife conser(...)

A little animal, curled up and sleeping, nose to furry tail, like a strokable netsuke, tumbled out of a bag of hay in front of a reader in Co Kildare (...)

A pair of rabbits was stuffed with breadcrumbs, onions and herbs, wrapped in thick slices of bacon, and then packed around with parsnips and carrots, (...)

A stray seed like a little black ball bearing flew from a passing wheel some years ago and took root at the soggy roadside outside the gate. The next (...)

The sight from our breakfast window of three or four hares pretending to ignore each other in the rocky meadow up the hill has promised that some mamm(...)

For well over a century and a half, how Ireland got its flora and fauna has been an open challenge for the country’s earth scientists. In the earliest(...)