Corona Wildlife Diary: Day Seventy-one

Day Seventy-One

After yesterday's mammal blog I started to think about what other mammals may be scurrying around in the garden. When I left work ten weeks ago I grabbed a few Longworth Mammal Traps from the equipment store.

These traps are the standard equipment for surveying smaller mammals like mice, shrews and voles and are designed to be very rodent-friendly. Let me show you how they work.

They are in two parts; a chamber and a tunnel.

At the back of the tunnel is a 'trip-wire'.

The animal wanders into the open tunnel and when the mouse / vole / shrew steps on the tripwire...

...it shuts the front door.

We fill the chamber with bedding, food (seeds for the rodents and mealworms for the insectivorous shrews) and bits of apple (which gives the animal water). 

Then we put the trap together and place it out where we think our mammals might be passing by...

...and go to bed. Early this morning I was up and collected the traps in. It was exciting to see that three out of four had their doors closed - which indicates that a mammal is in there (or a big slug) (or I put the trap down too heavy when I set it and the door closed).

I emptied the traps into this old fish tank so I could view the mammals. 

And in the first trap I had a...

Wood Mouse.

Straight away you can tell it apart from a vole because of its big ears. The Wood Mouse is the mouse you're most likely to encounter in Sussex - although their nocturnal lifestyle means that our paths seldom cross. They give birth to 3-8 young 4-6 times a year and you don't need a calculator to work out that's a lot of Wood Mice. The reason that we're not over-run with mice is down to the fact that Wood Mice have a lot of predators including Tawny Owls, Stoats, Foxes and Weasels.

The second trap was closed..but empty. But in the third we had this Yellow-necked Mouse.

Yellow-necked Mice are very similar to Wood Mice. They're slightly chunkier with a longer tail but the best way to identify them is to try and look at them from underneath because, as they're name suggests, they have a yellow neck. I managed to get a photo of both species when they 'stood up'.

Wood Mouse (left) and the yellow patch across the Yellow-necked Mouse's 'neck' (right)

These may be subtle identification differences but the Wood Mouse and Yellow-necked Mouse are completely different animals. The Wood Mouse ran around the fish tank endlessly pushing on the four glass walls, seemingly confused and a bit stupid. And then I gently let it go next to where I caught it.

The instant I put the Yellow-necked Mouse in the fishtank I knew what it was. Because the Yellow-necked Mouse is completely crazy...but also very clever.

The Yellow-neck Mouse did one quick circuit of the fishtank, pushing the glass walls as if assessing the situation. ("OK, glass chamber, four walls, no apparent weaknesses") It then sat in the middle of the fishtank as if it were formulating a plan. Then it seemed to realise the only way out would be...through the roof (in this case a plastic lid I had placed on top).

(Here's the Yellow-necked Mouse formulating its cunning escape plan)

With a very powerful jump the mouse sprung up and hit the roof, which budged slightly. Confident that there was some 'give' in the roof the Yellow-necked Mouse then contracted and summoned up all its energy. At that exact moment I was thinking "No way, surely it's not crazy enough to try and get through the roof" but the mouse, powered by its strong hind legs, jumped up and entirely dislodged the plastic lid. It sprung out of the fishtank, landed on the table, gave me a little salute, stuck out its tongue and dived back into the hedge.

OK, maybe the salute and tongue bit weren't true.