Winding up the year

Wee field mouse who jumped in our bird food bin.

It's the time of year when I check up on all the local colonies and see how they're doing. So far I've had a look at the field behind Saddler's Walk, or Mossfields as it's known, and also at Mike and Carolyn's voles out at Steel Heath. In both cases there was some feeding but no obvious latrines: I suspect both ditches have suffered through lack of rain this summer. However, there clearly was some water vole presence, so that's encouraging.

Small Mammal Survey Day at Preston Montford

ALWAYS hold a wood mouse by its scruff, never by its tail.

Suitable bait that will keep voles, mice and shrews all happy.

Opening the Longworth trap carefully inside a bag.

A bait tube for collecting droppings.

Using the metre square to document field vole signs.

Spent half a day at the marvellous Field Studies Centre at Montford Bridge looking at mammal surveying methods. Simon Poulton of the National Small Mammal Monitoring Scheme showed us four ways to survey.

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The first involved using ten Longworth traps set at intervals, in our case along a hedge. He told us that we should leave the traps out a day to let the animals get used to running in and out before we set the door to close. The traps need to have a wodge of hay inside to keep the animal warm, and be baited with juicy vegetables eg a cabbage leaf or a bit of carrot to provide hydration. If you're not using one of the new Longworths with a shrew escape hole, then you must include some blowfly pupae for them to eat. You also need to download a shrew-trapping licence from Natural England and have it on you while you're using the traps. By law you must check the traps every thirteen hours.

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Method two was to make a bait tube out of a six inch piece of plastic pipe, a square of muslin and an elastic band. Food is placed inside the tube and then it's left for seven to ten days. To check the contents - and we're talking poo here - you empty them into a plastic bag, one bag per tube, and send the droppings off for DNA analysis.

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Method three is one I've seen botanists and geographers use: the placing of a metre square over a piece of ground and then a thorough search of the area inside. We looked for field vole signs, and found them straight away.

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And lastly, you can go along hedgerows looking for harvest mouse nests, which are about the size of a tennis ball: http://www.flickr.com/photos/peut/499343711/

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However, you have to be methodical about the surveying, defining the area you're working in and the length of the section you're investigating. For more details about the national monitoring scheme that's taking place right now and needs as many volunteers as it can get, check out this site: http://www.mammal.org.uk/index.php?option=com_content&view=article&id=311&Itemid=345

or this Shropshire-based one: http://www.naturalshropshire.org.uk/SpeciesGroups/ShropshireMammalGroup/tabid/54/Default.aspx

Fieldfares and extra mice

Brown Moss Nature Reserve, completely frozen over.



On the advice of BBC2's 'Snow Watch' I put on the lawn some apple alongside the sunflower hearts and fat balls, and straight away attracted a fieldfare. I've never ever seen these in the garden before.
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Update: blimey, they're aggressive. Chris Packham didn't mention that! This one's strutting round with its tail up, diving furiously at anything that comes near. The blackbirds don't know what's hit them.

Meanwhile, in the greenhouse

New camera! I had a lot of bother with glare initially, till I taped a sheet of toilet paper over the lights. If anyone has any tips on how to get the best out of stealth trail cameras, let me know. This wood mouse has been living in the greenhouse for months, so I anticipate filming him quite a bit more.

What Mouse?

Came across this tiny chap while I was in Heave, near Kendal. I didn't have my Gadget for scale, but he wasn't much over an inch long. He (she?) didn't seem to be bothered by my presence at all, which was worrying - surely even baby mice know to run by instinct? But it didn't look ill and it kept stopping to eat. Great big back legs, anyway; I'm guessing wood mouse.