Voles, mice & shrews – a small mammal search

Last Saturday was quite a busy day in terms of getting outside and surrounded by nature. As you’ll see from my latest post, I was on a fungi foray in the morning with my local wildlife group then in the afternoon I was at the National Memorial Arboretum with their Wildlife Watch group, which I’m one of the leaders of.

The Wildlife Watch group here have monthly sessions and at each one they do a different activity. On Saturday Derek Crawley from the Mammal Society came along. He was a real star guest and introduced the group to the world of small mammals and trapping them for conservation purposes (to record and let free again).

On Saturday we had the regular attendees of the group along with the local cubs so there was quite a lot of us but it all ran smoothly and everyone was learning something new along with having a great time!

Around 40 traps were set up the night before in the intention of trapping small mammals such as voles, mice and shrews, and so we did! After we emptied the trap the children were able to have a look at what had been caught before it was released. Data of what was caught was also added to the records for this site.

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Is it a fox? No it’s a mouse!

On Sunday night I decided to set my trail camera up around a local nature reserve in the hope of recording foxes. I know there are foxes in the area as I’ve seen and heard them here in the past, so I set my trail camera up and put some dry dog food down. This was the second time in the last few days I’d set it in this area but the first time I had no luck. When I returned the next morning all the food had gone and as soon as I got there my dog, Max, started to roll around in the area in front of the camera so I was pretty certain foxes had been there through the night. But when I looked at what I had recorded I hadn’t recorded anything but a mouse! I’m not sure If it’s a field or wood mouse as the quality isn’t very good and he’s so small. To have not recorded foxes I think my camera had obviously stopped working at some point in the night but I’ll be back soon for some fox footage!

Here’s some of the videos I got of the mouse: