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.
Opening the first trap C6
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.
It’s a BoyWood Mouse has a yellow patch on chest
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.
Mouse A’s fur is clipped on left shoulderMeasuring the hind footWeighing
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.
I stumbled out of bed a bit late this morning and only just arrived in time to join the Vole Patrol team. The good news was some sunshine, birdsong (Song Thrush the highlight, with Great Tit, Robin, Dunnock, Long-Tailed Tit) for the dawn chorus, and proof from many of the traps of mammal activity.
Woodmouse Woz Ere
Without wishing to get too scatological, a Wood Mouse laid some definitive, er, evidence of its presence on the door of this trap, which does bear an uncanny resemblance to a miniature toilet. There are actually 2 mouse droppings (the other one is on the hinge) in the photo.
It’s a mouse dropping, not a shrew’s, as shrew poo contains so many shiny, slippery insect cuticle fragments that it tends to fall apart, whereas these pellets have the solid consistency of a mouse’s diet of seeds.
Huma mixing bait (photo Joanne from Grow Chiswick)
Other traps had had their bait balls eaten (but not the maggot larvae, which shrews would prefer); some had bait crumbs outside their entrances, and others had leaves dragged inside, as if to make a nice warm nest.
Ian labelling traps (Joanne photo)
Jo took these fine photos a day or two ago. I seem to have enjoyed labelling those traps!
At quarter to seven this morning we wrapped up well against the cold, on a beautiful clear day, the crescent moon glowing in the southeastern sky, and gathered at the hut. After a welcome cup of tea, we picked up haversacks full of boxes of bait balls, a little bag of apple slices and another of maggots, and a rubbish sack. We trooped off down the reserve to inspect the traps arrayed around the wood, meadow, and pond.
Was there a mammal in here? Inspecting one of the Waterside traps
A Song Thrush sang loudly and beautifully from the Willow Carr thicket.
Bait Taken from Meadow Trap
In the anthill meadow, trap M3 showed unmistakable signs of a mammal visit spilling from the entrance.
Did we catch something by mistake?
Another of the meadow traps caused a flurry of excitement. The trapdoor was up! Had we somehow caught a mammal, despite checking that all the trapdoors were locked down? Huma carefully opened the trap in a large plastic bag to prevent escape. There was nothing inside. Probably the trap had been left with the door closed.
Making Bait Balls
Back in the hut, still with surgical gloves on, we mixed up more bait and rolled it into balls. The little boxes that protect the bait balls in the haversacks are on the table.
Today we began a week of intensive trapping. Huma wants to survey the small mammals now, before there is any risk of catching pregnant or nursing mothers. So we are going to put out and check traps every morning and evening.
The traps we’ll be using are a new design of tube trap. They are less fiddly than the old aluminium Longworth traps, and a lot cheaper too. Huma thinks they’re “volunteer proof”: we wonder. Being plastic, they are warm and comfortable for the mice, voles and shrews we hope to catch.
Huma instructing the trapping group
We learnt what to measure, and the distinguishing features of the species that we may see. Huma explained how we would set out the traps, in a grid of three rows of six traps (so, A1 .. A6, B1 .. B6, C1 .. C6), evenly spaced in the woods, with four more up in the trees (T1.. T4), five in the meadow (M1 .. M5), and five near water (W1 .. W5).
Labelling tube traps
Each trap has two parts, so I painted its name onto each half.
We grouped the labelled traps into neat carrying trays.
Hay, Apple, Bait Balls
While I was painting, the others rolled chicken feed, peanut butter, seeds and water into bait balls.
Checking the Tube TrapsA sprinkling of frozen maggots
Then we put a handful of clean hay, a bit of apple, a bait ball, and a sprinkling of frozen maggots into the round end of each trap, armed the trap, locked the door open, and clicked the two halves together. The first two days and nights we don’t want to catch anything, but to accustom the mammals to visiting the traps.
We lined up in the wood, carefully set down the traps along natural edges, and marked their positions with hazard tape.
Science proceeds in slow steps, and things far more often become clear gradually than in dramatic Eureka! moments.
After “hours of fun” trying to decipher sheets of paper covered in a mass of footprints, we learnt that most of what we had seen were mouse/vole (indistinguishable as prints), squirrel, cat, and rat. Some of the West London survey sites in London Wildlife Trust’s Vole Patrol had evidence of other mammals, from camera trap shots of foxes and badgers to a fuzzy glimpse of an elusive otter.
Not a Yeti! Double prints of a cat giving a 5-toed look
Huma had been busy visiting all the sites, teaching volunteers, getting people to build mammal nestboxes (like birdboxes, but with the opening round the back!), and inspecting a lot of shrew tubes and sheets of paper covered in footprints.
The five-toed “Yeti” footprint turned out to be a cat (notice the streaks from its furry feet) which had placed one four-toed foot almost in the print of another, so there are two heels of the hand and the middle three toes double-printed. Of such are mysteries made.
Camera trap in position
We all enjoyed looking at what the camera traps had caught. The video clips were much easier to interpret than the still images. Several small children had crept up to the cameras and spent a while peering into the lenses (What? Me? I’m on camera?). Two foxes cavorted with long bushy tails. A badger ambled past like a crotchety old gentlemen on the way to his club. Mice with big round ears, surely wood mice, bounced and scuttled in and out of the field of view: sometimes only the glint of their eyes revealed their presence, and sometimes even that was very small and only at the edge of the frame.
Then we cleared an easily-wiped formica-topped table for … shrew poo analysis. We had up to ten baited tubes from each site. With surgical gloves, dissecting probes, tweezers and hand lenses, we carefully emptied each tube into a Petri dish and looked for mammal pellets. Mice eat seeds and produce solid, compact pellets, round one end, pointed the other. Shrews eat insects and produce pellets of a similar shape, but made of non-stick fragments of insect cuticle, so their pellets tend to crumble. Many of the tubes contained nothing; one or two had been lost in the field; several contained mouse pellets, most likely wood mouse; a few seemed to contain shrew pellets. We dropped the pellets into sealable inch-long plastic tubes labelled with their site, the date, and the shrew tube number, and recorded what we had found in the logbook, to much cheerful banter.
Mammal nestbox: Yes, the hole is meant to be on the back
It will become much easier to determine which wood contains which mammals when we start trapping in a fortnight’s time. Then we have to get up and be at the reserves by 6:30 in the morning for a two-hour stint, to be repeated in the afternoon. My family will be amazed if I manage any kind of early morning.
Today we all put on waders and got into cold muddy water.
I shovelled silt into an ingenious floating bucket system: the bucket had holes in the bottom to let the water out but it seemed to keep most of the mud in. It was possible to scoop to a depth most of the length of the shovel. Then I towed the silt bucket to the shore (much easier than carrying it) to empty it.
Dragging the silt bucket to land
I also completed the coppicing of the Willow in the background of the photo. It was a stout stump, very dry and hard, and it was quite a task with a small Silkie saw, but better than using a blunt bowsaw!
Meanwhile, the others set about cutting the encroaching Reeds and pulling out a fair number of their long white rhizomes that spread out in the mud. We tried to spare the floating pondweeds, starwort and water mint.
Reed-cutting
A group of Great Tits made a din mobbing a Magpie; and a little later, several Jays spent a while screeching while a pair of Magpies chattered back.
One of the real difficulties in nature conservation is the basic fact that humans have short lives and shorter memories.
We instinctively assume that the way the countryside “should” look is … how it looked when we were young. Obviously, it had been that way since time immemorial, at least since the year 1 B.M. (where B.M. means “Before Me”). In Feral, George Monbiot calls this “Shifting Baseline Syndrome” – each new generation sets the baseline to the time of its own youth: we imagine our childhood landscape to have been just right, good, and natural.
Only it wasn’t. Our limited time horizon obscures the fact that the countryside has been changing continuously since Roman times, indeed since the Stone Age. Forests have been felled, making way for fields, towns, and roads. Already by 1000 AD, most of Britain’s forests had disappeared, and our larger forest animals like bear, wolf, lynx and wolverine were disappearing with them.
But even in a single lifetime, the loss of once-familiar species is shockingly evident. I had a small reminder when I found one of my birdwatching notebooks from my schooldays. We had been on a Natural History Society trip to Portland Bill, where we stayed in the old lighthouse, a bird observatory in a fine location for counting (and trapping and ringing) arriving and departing migrants. A group of us walked out in the bright sunshine on 1 September 1972, and I listed what we saw.
Portland Bill Bird List 1 Sept 1972
I was pleased to see a Raven, a Garden Warbler, and a Kittiwake, as I would be today, though all these species are doing well. I was reasonably pleased to hear a Little Owl, something that would now be rather special. I was quite unsurprised to see 20 House Sparrows, and I don’t seem to have found the Turtle Dove or the Redstart at all remarkable. Either of those would now be close to the highlight of the year: and the Song Thrush too, once a regular garden bird, has become really rather uncommon. Then there are the Skylark and Whinchat, which I gave no more notice to than the Linnet, Jackdaw and Stonechat; and the Sand Martin too is declining alarmingly. The 39 Goldfinches, on the other hand, were somewhat remarkable to me then, but I see nearly as many in flocks around the quieter streets in town. I didn’t think the presence of 5 warblers worth noting, though at least that isn’t too terribly difficult to achieve today – just a matter of going to a reasonably decent nature reserve, as there won’t be many species on farmland (you’re lucky to get Chiffchaff and Blackcap, really). The mixture of farmland species, birds of open moorland (Meadow Pipit, Wheatear), and coastal species (Shag, Kittiwake, Rock Pipit) is far more remarkable than I realised at the time, and is probably characteristic of those headlands where migrants congregate.
It would be interesting to repeat the walk early in September (or in the spring migration) and see what we’d see. I think there would be fewer species. And a lot fewer sparrows.
Greenpeace have just published a fold-out poster listing how well the British supermarket chains have done with their supposedly “sustainable” Tuna in cans. There are no percentage scores, though some must have been calculated: instead, the supermarkets are ranked from deepest green (presumably near 100% sustainable, i.e. you could go on doing that forever – isn’t that the only plain meaning of the word?) through to brightest red, cheerfully labelled “Unsustainable and harms marine life” (one might say that applies to all scores less than 100%, no?).
In the green corner is Waitrose, “Your go-to #JustTuna brand for 2016”, I guess that hash sign is a snappy little address for some American web gadget or other, maybe a teenager can help me out on that one.
In the red corner (boo! hiss!) is an old-established brand, John West. According to the poster, “More than 98% of John West’s tuna is caught using destructive fishing methods”. Naughty step: copy out “I must not use enormous nets that catch sharks, turtles and rays” 1000 times neatly without smudging now.
Seriously, it’s disgraceful that a famous old company should be taking so little care of a resource on which its commercial well-being, its very existence as a company, depends. Properly managed – truly sustainably – Tuna fishing will last forever, or until the human race wipes itself out (delete as preferred). Badly managed – as now – the ocean’s Tuna fisheries will go the way of Cannery Row in Monterey (now the marvellous aquarium there), of the Tonnara of Scopella in Sicily (remembered wonderfully by Gavin Maxwell), indeed of Britain’s long-gone North Sea tuna fishery —and yes, it sounds unimaginable now, doesn’t it? That’s how “canned tuna” will sound in a few years’ time if we don’t sort our ideas on sustainability out.
Pole-sawing a long Cherry branch. It’s leaning right the way across the seasonal pondFirst branch down (this is turning out to be more of a faff than we expected) (13 October)2nd branch down, path closed (20 October)Path temporarily closed due to dangerous treeCherry felled, Apple remaining (23 October)Split ends – the cherry stumpCause or Effect? Beetle borings in Birch trunk
The trunk had been largely covered in ivy, making it quite unobvious that it was about to fall. Once cleaned, the splits in the trunk were evident enough, and we started to remove branches. Only when felled, however, could it be seen that there were finger-thick beetle borings in the centre of the trunk, either side of the splits in the timber. What is not so easy to determine is whether the splits allowed beetles in, or whether the beetle borings weakened the trunk, making failure inevitable. For the record, the wood appears solid and durable all around the beetle holes: not rotten.
The English seem unemotional … except for their passion for nature
