The tawny owl population in one of the UK's largest forests is booming as a result of the harsh winter, a Forestry Commission expert said today.

Ahead of the relegation showdown between the two clubs on Sunday the Sheffield Wednesday chairman Lee Strafford has suggested Crystal Place should already have been relegated after going into administration.

A couple who ran a pet shop turned their hand to illegal trading in the skins and bones of some of the most endangered species in the world.

Far in the future, Hanck Orn, repairer and seller of machines – "obsoletes" like typewriters and telescopes – lives with, and for, his son, Toby, in a big city where Swedish is spoken. The centuries have shorn the language of its umlauts. When Hanck realises that his surname should really be Örn (Eagle), he can appreciate more clearly his own existential position. Here he is in a place where the contaminated air is death-dealing, violence makes it dangerous to be out, and living is regulated by the mysterious Clan. Is that not like being a bird-of-prey with clipped wings? Hanck knows the eagle's fabled history as the only creature who dared defy Loki, most sinister of the Norse gods, who have re-emerged and make up the Clan.

Simon Thirgood, an authority on wild deer and birds of prey, was one of Scotland's best-known conservationists. He was the author, with Stephen Redpath, of a landmark report on birds of prey and red grouse which proved that hen harriers can, under some circumstances, ruin the commercial value of a grouse moor. The debate had damaged relations between moorland owners and conservationists. Thirgood took a characteristically pragmatic and positive line by pioneering a way of resolving the conflict by providing alternative food for the harriers.

Police investigating the death of a golden eagle said today the bird had been poisoned.

I'm absolutely mad on mad people. Some of my favourite artworks and novels appear to have been spewed from the hands and minds of mad folk, from Henry Darger to Alfred Jarry to Jean-Michel Basquiat, but none has made a more prominent dent on my brain than the Comte de Lautreamont's potty page-turner, Les Chants du Maldoror. It's like an old, twisted rulebook on how to break all literary rules.

There is something very odd about the great third runway debate. The Government, supported by all kinds of business and City interests, insists that Heathrow has to expand as a matter of emergency. At the same time the industry is in a state of crisis with falling numbers of passengers, staff being laid off and in some cases national carriers going bust.