Michael Viney answers your queries and observations on nature.
Is it okay to feed garden birds when they are nesting? I leave out moist bread crumbs and heels for them all year round.
Frances Jeawon, Sandyford, Dublin 18
The following can be fed to birds all year round: moist wholemeal bread; cooked rice, pasta, pastry and potatoes; stale cake and biscuits; crumbled cheese; bacon; suet; bruised fruit, soaked dried fruits; peanuts, chopped unless in nut feeders; fresh coconut; bird seed. Don't feed salted nuts, desiccated coconut or highly-spiced food.
I saw an orange-tip butterfly leaving a cuckoo flower on April 17th. Is this a little early in the year for the butterfly to be on the wing?
Daniel Cronin, Model Farm Road, Cork
Both the orange-tip and the cuckoo flower or lady's smock were right on time.
How long can a little migratory warbler expect to live? It seems as though the same male chiffchaff returns every spring to our garden.
Kieran Fitzpatrick, Greystones, Co Wicklow
The chiffchaff , like other warblers, can live for six or seven years.