Outdoors

With most families confined to their homes in efforts to curtail the spread of Covid-19, there has arguably never been a better time to observe and ap(...)

The song thrush joins me half an hour before dawn, perching on the bare, topmost branch of the hawthorn outside my workroom window. He sings steadily(...)

In mid-March my daughter found this creature while walking on the beach in Salthill, Galway. It was about 3 inches long. – Fran McCormack, Salthill, G(...)

The German poet Rilke captured such moments well: “The sap is mounting back from that unseeness Darkly renewing in the common deep Back to the ligh(...)

My morning foray to the rain-gauge, measuring tube in hand, is a plod along a well-worn, muddy track in what used to be the lawn. Head bowed to the wi(...)

In our garden on Howth Head we occasionally have had a red squirrel, but this year a grey has appeared. I wondered if the red squirrels are being disp(...)

In an early initiation into sheep-country nightlife, I was awoken on a winter night by a sudden blaze of light beyond the bedroom curtains. Peering ou(...)

It’s easy to forget at a time like this that something as ordinary as the annual National Tree Week is taking place. As walking is one of the few acti(...)

Spring has come early to Sutton. My neighbour’s clematis montana rubens is already in full bloom, and cowslips are out in good numbers at Red Rock. I’(...)

Swamping the ditches, swelling the streams, brimming the rivers beyond their banks, February’s floods arrived at the sea with a whole new burden of se(...)