Author Archives: Mary Montague

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About Mary Montague

Writer and biologist. Contributor to The Guardian's Country Diary. https://www.theguardian.com/profile/mary-montague Website: https://mary-montague.com

An intimate and tenuous connection

Posted on September 17, 2025 by Mary Montague

I’ve been thinking a lot about relationships recently. How the most intimate can also be the most fragile. How we don’t realise what we have until it’s gone. The world is feeling an increasingly fragile place. Trusted relationships are distorted … Continue reading →

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Chasing my tail

Posted on June 7, 2025 by Mary Montague

It’s been a while. First there’s the matter of my most recent contribution to The Guardian‘s Country Diary. As the more long-memoried of you will recall, I wrote about Newgrange for December. And I went back to Brú na Bóinne … Continue reading →

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A Wolf’s Breath

Posted on April 10, 2025 by Mary Montague

I love this photo. I especially love it because just a few weeks after it was taken, I visited Yellowstone in January 2004 and saw this very wolf. I was also introduced to her natal pack, the Druids (named for … Continue reading →

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Choose your riches

Posted on April 9, 2025 by Mary Montague

Where is your treasure? I was delighted to have this chance to write about the Sperrins, and meeting Fidelma O’Kane and other members of the Save Our Sperrins campaign was a truly inspirational experience. It was prompted by an invitation … Continue reading →

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Singing through the noise

Posted on April 7, 2025 by Mary Montague

I’ve have been meaning to write about this since I saw this article in the Guardian a few weeks ago, on response of Galapagos warblers to traffic noise. Having done a PhD on the impact of anthropogenic noise on birdsong, … Continue reading →

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Celebrating 40 Contributions to The Guardian’s Country Diary

Posted on March 17, 2025 by Mary Montague

Lá fhéile Pádraig sona dhaoibh! (Happy St Patrick’s Day everyone!). It’s a wee bit of an occasion for me today – my 40th contribution to The Guardian‘s Country Diary was published this morning. So in all the celebrations today, I’m … Continue reading →

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Is Mary Oliver a good poet?

Posted on February 23, 2025 by Mary Montague

Once again, this question (no idea if Henry is a relative, but I’d say not). In the days I mixed in “academic” poetry circles, I found myself, as I’ve blogged before, astonished at the sneery attitude to MO. And as … Continue reading →

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The turn of the Celtic Spring

Posted on February 6, 2025 by Mary Montague

I was lucky enough to be able to céilí at Danny Gormley’s in the townland of Rotten Mountain  (a transliteration from the Irish: the original name may have been rath tine (fort of fire) or raithneach muine (shrubbery of ferns), … Continue reading →

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After the storm

Posted on January 26, 2025 by Mary Montague

Yesterday there was a brief respite between Storm Éowyn on Friday and today’s pretty standard wind and rain. Thankfully we got through Éowyn fairly unscathed, losing only a couple of tiles from the “rooflet” over our downstairs bay window. Mind … Continue reading →

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Why does the bird bob its head?

Posted on January 18, 2025 by Mary Montague

My latest Country Diary come out in today’s Saturday Guardian. Which is lovely because Saturday is the day we always get the paper copy … Which also means I can upload this lovely image of a stylised redshank that accompanied … Continue reading →

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