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.
Huma Pearce, mammal expert, in Gunnersbury Triangle
The hut in the Gunnersbury Triangle Nature Reserve, which is managed by London Wildlife Trust, was buzzing with excitement. It was packed full of people on a bitterly cold winter’s day, everyone eager to find out how to map London’s mammals.
You might think that in a metropolis of some ten million people, pretty much everything would be known by now about the city’s wildlife.
But that’s not so. A quick look at the existing maps of some of our mammals – from field vole to otter – tells a simple story. Hardly anything has been published about what lives where in London.
The field is wide open for new discoveries, and those are what we hope to make in the next year as we track down those voles, and maybe some larger animals into the bargain.
London Wildlife Trust has secured £97,000 from the Heritage Lottery Fund to study the distribution and abundance of small mammals in 9 woodland sites in West London. Although the focus will be on small woodland mammals, Huma (the mammal expert employed to co-ordinate and deliver the surveys) also hopes that with the help of volunteers she will be able to collect mammal data from a range of sites of different sizes, scattered across the boroughs of Hounslow, Ealing, Hillingdon and Harrow.
On each of the 9 woodland sites, the project will need to find out which species are present, and to estimate their numbers. But small mammals are shy, inconspicuous and mainly active at night. Tracking them down isn’t easy.
So Huma is getting together and training a “Vole Patrol”, a small army of volunteers, keen to get down and dirty with wildlife. That means us! We need to know how to collect data on the mammals, without hurting them, or disturbing them more than absolutely necessary. That means training.
The first thing you might think of is live trapping, and we’ll do some. Huma showed us a Longworth trap, a light aluminium contraption made of two boxes that lock together. You put some food and bedding inside; a trapdoor falls when little feet venture inside.
But small animals particularly shrews need food all the time. You have to visit all your traps after six hours, to ensure that any animals captured are safe, and to identify the species before they are released. We’ll do some trapping later in the year.
Numbering a hedgehog tunnel
We’re starting, instead, with some baited hedgehog tunnels. Hedgehogs are hibernating at this time of year, so we don’t expect them, but the design is proven, and good for a variety of small mammals too. We assemble them from Correx sheets, like cardboard only waterproof. We fold them into a triangular tube, with a fourth side as an overlap, which we stick down with Velcro. Another sheet of plastic slides inside as a tray.
Clean paper, wet paint, food, paint, paper to slide into hedgehog tunnel
We stick a plastic dish in the middle, and fix masking tape both sides to hold some paint, which we mix up from non-toxic carbon powder and vegetable oil. At either end we pin down a sheet of paper. The dish is baited with special ‘Hog’ biscuits and dried mealworms: it almost looks appetising.
Hundreds of footprints!
We hide the hedgehog tunnels away from likely disturbance. The next day, sure enough, hundreds of footprints are spattered all over the sheets. The small ones are surely mice or voles; the larger ones not so easy to guess.
As well, there seem to be marks of tails dragged through the paint. We have to repeat the process every day for five days, with each tunnel.
Other volunteers will do the same in each of the other survey sites.
As well as the hedgehog tunnels, we take out a boxful of nest tubes. They’re made of yet more Correx sheet formed into square tubes, each with a simple wooden tray that slides in and out; the back is closed with a square of wood.
Fixing a nest tunnel into position
These were to be laid out in a rectangular grid. Easier said than done in a tangled, muddy wood! We push through the brambles, trying not to create more paths than we had to, looking for low branches out of sight of the paths, where we could tie on the nest tunnels. Then we recorded their positions with GPS. We’ll go back later in the year to see which of the boxes have been used.
We also put down some plastic tubes baited with mealworms, low down near a pond, for water shrews to visit, and perhaps to leave a few tokens (in other words, shrew poo) to indicate their visit. Species can be broadly identified from their droppings, but Huma is hoping that we might be able to get these, or little tufts of fur, analysed for DNA to prove which species was responsible.
Cherry Stone opened by vole in Gunnersbury Triangle
We can find out about mammals in other ways too. Different animals open nuts and cherry stones in their own ways: squirrels snap them roughly in half; mice nibble a neat round hole; voles bite into the shell more irregularly. We found a cherry stone near the first hedgehog tunnel: a small mammal had gnawed an irregular hole with sharp tooth-marks along its edge.
A Camera Trap in position for any small mammals in the grass
A glimpse of small mammals can be gained with camera traps, as seen on TV nature documentaries. You tie them onto a tree, overlooking a likely mammal run, and with any luck you’ll see mice, or voles, or who knows, maybe a weasel or an otter. London’s mammals are about to become a lot more famous.
Huma is keen to involve as many people from the local community in the project. So, if you would like to volunteer on some mammal surveys, I suggest you contact her by email: hpearce@wildlondon.org.uk
