Outdoors

This article relates to the upcoming Irish Times Winter Nights festival. More details at the bottom of this page. For full line-up and tickets go to&n(...)

A few weeks ago I saw a pair of swifts in the local park, sweeping around in dizzying arcs, swooping towards the ground but never touching, never stop(...)

My son took this picture underwater of a jellyfish. It is like the common jellyfish but without the four pink rings. Is it unusual? Brian Ó Cuiv, Indr(...)

Someone has pocketed my lovely gannet’s skull – well, probably not, but it seems to have disappeared from the years-old jumble of tideline ossuary on (...)

I came across this unusual pink grasshopper in the woods just outside Ennis. What species is it? – Emer Dunne, Ennis, Co Clare The common field grassh(...)

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(...)

At the far end of Dursey island, Co Cork, the choughs are gathering in new families to probe the ground for grubs, stabbing the wind-shorn grass with (...)

This bird is recovering after crashing into the kitchen window. The beak and tail are long. – Valerie Collins from Killorglin, Co Kerry. It’s a j(...)

Weeks of cold, raw, early rain, then droughty weeks of a misplaced summer; weeks of showery rain again, some of it teasingly warm: such are the mood s(...)

I thought this was a twig that somehow got stuck on the wall. On closer inspection it revealed itself as, I assume, a moth. Darryl Broe, Corca Dhuibhn(...)