We approached the now armed and possibly triggered traps with some excitement. Of the six traps in “our” row C, four had been triggered. We picked them up, locked the other two so we wouldn’t catch any more mice while we were analysing the catch, and brought the four traps to Huma.

She opened trap C6 inside a large bag. A Wood Mouse shot out into the bag. I got a very blurry picture of a shadow behind the plastic.

Huma reached for the Wood Mouse. It bounced speedily up her arm, through the gap at the top of the bag, and hopped away over the tarpaulin. None of our other traps had anything in them. I must have looked disappointed as Huma told me there would be more.

Luckily there was: one of the meadow traps had caught a fine large male Wood Mouse.

We sexed, coded (A = clipped patch on left shoulder), measured body length and hind foot, and weighed the mouse. It wriggled quite hard and almost escaped, but Huma was quicker.

Then we took the mouse, still in its bag, back where it came from and let it go. Likely it will feast on the plentiful bait in the warm dry trap again.

Out of 32 traps, 8 had triggered and 2 had mice in them, much too high a false alarm rate, so Huma reset their sensitivity for tomorrow morning.