Best laid traps of mice and men

bank voles like jumpers

Mid-November is no time to be surveying the British countryside for small mammals. Especially when it involves setting and checking humane traps before dawn and after dusk around the marshy edge of a lake, in waterlogged clay. And when you’re looking for our tiniest (and rather elusive) mammal: the harvest mouse. Probably in the wrong place.

Mr Amiable

There are compensations, undoubtedly. The midday trapping shift brings sunshine and bank voles, smaller cousins of the watery variety immortalised as “Ratty” in Wind in the Willows, and surely our most amiable little furry critter. Most will happily sit in your hand, nestle into a jumper, or even crawl into your hair, posing patiently for photographs.

Susy loves voles

Woodmice prove the most frequent visitors to our traps, so much more wriggly and bitey and almost impossible to photograph unless you’re happy to settle for a brownish blur with whiskers. I have to admit to a soft spot for them, though. They are feisty little beasts, adaptable and determined survivors in our degraded countryside.
 

 

Field vole, darker with v short tail

In case you’re alarmed by all this talk of trapping, let me assure you that each creature is handled expertly and minimally, before being returned to the spot where it was found – in one piece. A few decades ago it was common practice to clip off selected toes of small mammals in order to recognise re-captures. Thankfully, this is now illegal.

I could write an entire post about the different types of traps we use, but I can already sense you reaching for the mouse (no pun intended) to click away to another site. Suffice to say that volunteers – yes, we’re not even being paid for this – are perfectly happy with Longworth traps. 



Help! I'm not the target species

Trip traps, allegedly favoured by harvest mice - though we never had the chance to find out - are cheap smoked plastic constructions which look to me like a family-sized toothbrush holder. They require a daub of sticky bait supplied to us in the form of peanut butter mashed up with maggots and seed – perhaps worth marketing as a sandwich filler. (It has to taste better than the “sandwich spread” my mum put in my packed lunches for school).

hair vole

But whoever designed the Sherman trap deserves serious retribution in another life, perhaps reincarnation as a woodmouse. Very like an Ikea flat pack with instructions only in Swedish, but all on a miniscule scale, it takes true determination to assemble in the dark with wet, cold fingers, by the light of a headtorch.

Susy & Alison at work

A big thank to the Surrey Wildlife Trust and their volunteers: Jo, Emma, Sheila and Nicky, who travelled to the Common from far and wide to help us out.

So, harvest mice, I hope to meet you on the Common one day and admire your golden fur, feather-light body and prehensile tail, unique among British mammals. But I think you had the last chuckle this time…
 

harvest mouse nest?

Afterword: Having penned this post, I went for a sunny walk on the Common this afternoon and found what I think is an abandoned harvest mouse nest on another part of the Common… Just too maddening!

Autumn on the Common

tunnel of light

The Common is preparing for its long winter sleep – already waterlogged this autumn and very short on acorns, crab apples, hazelnuts and berries, which birds and small mammals rely on through the coldest months.

I ventured out into autumn sunshine after an absence of several weeks and my spirits lifted immediately as I approached the tunnel of light leading to my favourite stretches of wood pasture. It felt quiet and lonely without the grazing cattle, returned to the farmyard for winter, and the bush  where adders like to bask was abandoned.

woodmouse nest

But in the wildwood corner where we sited our dormouse nest boxes there were abundant signs of woodmice: boxes crammed full with dry brown oak leaves, and in one a family of four popping out of the back, one by one. They’re not fussy about who the boxes were designed for, just happy to make do with whatever shelter is available. Perhaps that’s why they’re so successful.

des res for dormice

A few days later, after a heavy frost, I found a very torpid adder snatching a few weak rays of sunshine before hibernation. He was like a stubborn child refusing to accept it was bedtime even though he was clearly cold and tired - so sluggish, I could easily have picked him up if I’d been feeling stupid.

torpid male adder

Our hot dry spring in March, followed by thewettest summer on record and a similarly drenched autumn, has been disastrous for most fauna and flora. Frogs found empty ponds when they wanted to spawn; many bats and dormice failed to gain enough weight to breed; songbird broods perished in torrential rain; it was too wet for bees to pollinate fruiting trees; butterflies foundered.

amethyst deceiver

Fungi, though, are having a ball in the sodden ground. The meadow margins are festooned with vivid colours, peculiar textures and weirder shapes, most of them nibbled by hungry mice. The amethyst deceiver dazzles me every time with the depth of its colour, its delicate shape and exquisite curvy gills. You would think from the name that it contains deadly poison – but no, it’s very edible.

fungi on dead log

A local fungi expert gives sound advice for an amateur forager keen to avoid poisoning herself: “Don’t eat anything with gills”. There are more than 4,000 species of fungi in Surrey alone, most with variable colours and forms and some extremely hard to tell apart, even by mycologists.

 

Rain cows

Blondie giving me a broad smile as he tucks into young willow

This year anyone could be forgiven for thinking it's raining cows, not just cats and dogs. Yesterday I set off under a steady drizzle to check our conservation grazing herd on the Common. This involves walking the fence line of three separate meadows to confirm it's all intact - we don't want cows escaping onto nearby roads - as well as counting the cattle in each area and making sure they're all in good health, and checking their troughs are full.

betony in Rye Meadow

The cows displayed a bovine indifference to rain. Their coats have an oily waterproof sheen and water falling from the sky wasn't going to deter them from eating and digesting the green riches around them. This is a 24-hour a day job for them and their dedication to it is admirable. Perhaps if I stop washing my hair, it too will develop a waterproof layer of oil, but friends and family might complain about the smell...

Horton Heath steer tackling trees

Under the rain, which grew steadily heavier over the next two-and-a-half hours, I viewed the countryside as a green smudge around me, with somewhat blurry edges. A bit like some of my photographs, but bear with me, it was raining, the cows were moving, and I was desperately trying to keep my camera dry.

Pincushion gall on Horton Heath

Despite the weather, I felt a deep contentment. The rain had driven away all other human disturbances - even the dog-walkers had gone home - and I had the Common and it's wildlife all to myself. Incredibly, a few butterflies were on the wing: brown ringlets. Later I read, in a doom-laden article about butterflies in trouble in this wettest of summers, that ringlets (and speckled woods) like damp conditions.

Roebuck by the fence in Rye Meadow

water figwort

In Rye Meadow, my favourite piece of pasture, I spotted a roebuck lying beside the electric fence right out in the open. As I approached like a child playing grandmother's footsteps, I began to fear that its determination to stay put was a sign of injury, but at the last moment it bounded away.

This part of the Common resisted the plough during the wartime "dig for victory" campaign, unlike our main grazing area, and it has retained a diverse seedbank of wildflowers, rushes, sedges and grasses. It was cleared of secondary woodland just two to three years ago and, with sunlight striking the ground again for the first time in decades, the seeds germinated. Yesterday I found water figwort and betony in flower.

In deep cover in the main grazing area

I didn't notice how wet and tired I was until I got home...
















ps We don't normally give our cows names but Blondie seemed an obvious choice for the only white one. They belong to a local farmer and are destined for the table eventually. At least they enjoy one of the best summers a cow could wish for on the Common. And as dairy steers, most of their peers are killed at birth: males don't give milk and their breeding makes their muscles unsuited for prime cuts.

Kaleidoscope fritillaries

Marsh Fritillary - male

Finglandrigg Wood sounds like a setting from Lord of the Rings or one of the Icelandic sagas, but the reality is even more magical. It is among four sites chosen in Cumbria to re-introduce the marsh fritillary butterfly after it reached the brink of extinction in the county around the millenium. I made a round trip of 100 miles to reach it from our Lakeland cottage.

“Kaleidoscope” is one of several collective nouns for butterflies but it suits the marsh fritillary perfectly. Its latin name, Euphydryas aurinia, roughly translates as “golden floating checkerspot”.

The site, managed by Natural England, has a magic of its own. In the lay-by where I parked, I bumped into another butterfly enthusiast from Norfolk (again!), who explained in detail the mile-long trail I needed to follow to find the butterflies and assured me they were flying in dozens and much easier to photograph than the elusive mountain ringlets. With my hopeless sense of direction, I might easily have missed them altogether without his instructions, despite the helpful butterfly waymarks.

With rising anticipation, like a child on Christmas Eve, I walked first through dappled woodland, across a stream humming with damsels and dragons, through a gate into boggy heathland dotted with grazing cattle. There was a sign warning of adders and I thought to myself, “Can it get any better?” but sadly it was already too warm for basking reptiles. Then I came to a buttercup meadow, a splash of gleaming yellow in the sun, possibly the most splendid buttercup meadow I’ve ever seen.

Beyond that another field, damp grassland and suddenly the kaleidoscope started spinning. The word “fritillary” comes from the latin “fritillus” – dice box. Romans kept their dice in boxes with an inlaid chequered pattern, just like the wings of the butterflies named after them.

The Marsh fritillaries flitted from one clump of damp grass to another, undefeated by a strong gusting breeze in their mission to find a mate. The foodplant of their larvae is devil’s bit scabious, not yet in flower when I visited in late May.  In summer the black caterpillars live gregariously on webs spun across it. When I stopped in nearby Kirkhampton to buy some lunch, the shopkeeper told me that local children had been planting devil’s bit scabious for the butterflies – “to help them come back”.

After a few photographs, I sat down in the damp grass to marvel at the marsh fritillaries’ checkerboard orange, almost red and creamy yellow wings, separated by a fat furry body. A mating pair landed on a tussock beside me – the male larger with broadly open wings, the female fluttering her wings closed from time to time. The male walked them, oblivious, onto my hand.

The story of their reintroduction to Cumbria is worth retelling, though you can find it in more detail on the website of Butterfly Conservation’s Cumbria Branch. At one time there were some 200 colonies of marsh fritillary in Cumbria but by the year 2000 they had dwindled to three and four years later were facing extinction in the county. The situation continued to worsen despite attempts to manage their habitats carefully to suit their needs. Conservationists found just one egg batch on the last site in 2004.

The Cumbria Marsh Fritillary Action Group brought together decision makers from Butterfly Conservation, Natural England and Defra, and thanks to a very supportive individual at Natural England gained a licence within a single day to take the last 150 larvae into captivity. Several reasons for the drastic decline were considered: loss of habitat as marginal land was brought into farming production, too much shading from trees on field edges, parasitic wasps which attack the caterpillars in waxing and waning cycles, and genetic weakness in the isolated and tiny colony.

One of the all-important grazers

Three batches of larvae were raised in captivity, one pure Cumbrian, one from colonies in Argyll and one a mixture of the two. The results suggested that genetic weakness was the problem as none of the pure Cumbrian stock successfully emerged as adults. By 2007 45,000 caterpillars of mixed Scottish and Cumbrian heritage had been reared and four sites were prepared for their release. Butterfly conservationists learnt a great deal from the process.

Finglandrigg, 13 km west of Carlisle on the Solway plain, is the only site open to the public, and what a site it is – not just for the fritillaries. It also counts red squirrels, brown hares, badgers, otters, roe deer, many species of dragon and damselflies and warblers among its residents.

Needless to say, the marsh fritillary is one of the UK’s fastest declining butterflies, though it is also found in Argyll, the west coast of Ireland and Wales and the English Westcountry. But the success of the Cumbrian reintroduction shows just how much a handful of dedicated naturalists can achieve. I owe them a debt of thanks: they made my heart soar.

 

Mountain ringlet

Mountain ringlet

<sup>Why do we love butterflies and dragonflies above all other insects? I think it has something to do with the way they embody the fleeting nature of extreme beauty.

A few weeks ago I visited the Lake District, in what must have been it’s annual week of warmth and sunshine. To me this was an invitation to seek out two rare species of butterfly which don’t exist on my home patch in the South East. Partly inspired by Patrick Barkham’s The Butterfly Isles, I decided to set out on a lepidoterous quest (lepidoptera, "scaly-winged insects", hardly does justice to these creatures.)

Mountain ringlet, the first species in my sights, seemed easy enough. The Cumbrian branch of Butterfly Conservation identifies a super-colony on Irton Pike, just up the road from where we were staying. We were a few days early for its annual emergence, but the weather had been warm and sunny for a few days. Sure enough, as we reached the top of the hill we started to see little dark brown butterflies dancing across the Fell and a few settled just long enough for us to see the red spots on their wings.</sup>



My partner chasing butterflies on Irton Pike

<sup>We met another butterfly enthusiast from Norfolk, also on their trail, who pointed us to the best areas to see them among the mat grass, the foodplant of their caterpillars. Soon we were seeing dozens, but they were far too flighty and fast to photograph clearly. My partner and I must have looked pretty mad chasing them up and down the fell, stumbling over tussocks and into boggy pockets.

Small heaths and green hairstreaks – something of a rarity in Surrey – were everywhere, but we had little time to stop and photograph them.</sup>



Mountain ringlet on my fingers

^{A couple of days later, I returned on a cooler overcast morning, on the hunt for torpid mountain ringlets hiding in the long grass. And my patience was rewarded. Having far less energy to fly, they posed for photographs from all angles and a couple even crawled onto my hand, as I sat in the grass, admiring them.}

^{“Happiness is a butterfly, which when pursued, is always just beyond your grasp, but which, if you will sit down quiety, may alight upon you.” Nathaniel Hawthorne, 19th century American writer.}

^{Since returning to Surrey, I’ve learnt just how lucky we were to enjoy this bountiful sighting. Many butterfly enthusiasts with decades of experience have never seen a mountain ringlet. By visiting a super-colony on a warm, sunny day we had obviously boosted our chances significantly.}

Mountain ringlet in mat grass

^{As the UK’s only alpine butterfly, the mountain ringlet lives at high altitudes on exposed sites, and emerges in small batches during its flight season – no doubt an evolutionary adaptation to increase the chances of at least one batch catching some fine weather. Individuals live for just a few days; it must be at least 15 degrees Celsius for them to fly and no hotter than 23.  The species is only found in the highlands of Scotland and a few pockets in the Lake District. As our climate warms, it is pushed further and further up the hillside, until eventually (scientists fear), it will run out of mountain to climb.}



The view from Irton Pike towards Wast Water

^{Butterfly Conservation predicts that the mountain ringlet will be extinct in Britain by the 2050s (largely due to global warming). In the words of Peter Marren, author of Bugs Britannica, “this modest brown butterfly has at last achieved a kind of melancholy fame as a victim of climate change and an icon of the fragility of life in a rapidly changing world.”}

^{Read about the second species, the marsh fritillary, in my next blog.}

^{With thanks to the Cumbrian branch of Butterfly Conservation for their help in finding these beauties during my visit and for looking after them and their habitats.}

The sound of spring

A second spring has tiptoed into my Surrey garden, much more tentatively than the first. March swaggered in, brazen, searing moisture from the ground with its day-after-day sun and warmth. In May, after weeks of torrential rain and wind, the clouds part more hesitantly. Birds, bugs and flowers seem a little less trusting...

I lie on my back, drinking in the sounds of the garden: fluty whistles and warbles from blackbirds high in the trees, a song thrush repeating increasingly ambitious phrases, bumblebees humming among the tiny bell-like flowers of blueberry plants behind me. A stream of clicks, like a dolphin under water, spews from the giant fir tree. A bird?

A chill northerly wind rakes its fingers through the silver birch's maiden tresses and in a neighbouring garden a child screams for his dad. From time to time the human world blots out nature: the sound of a drill on masonry, passenger jets overhead, the distant whine of a chainsaw, a murmuration of mowers…

Lying on the grass, with my eyes closed, my mind fills with the sounds of spring. It’s surprising how much detail you hear when your vision, that domineering human sense, is switched off. The soundscape is rich, and reaches you from so many directions at once, unlike the light signals from our forward-facing eyes.

For a moment I muse about which sounds I love most. I decide that if I were ever locked in a cell and allowed just one soundtrack, (an unlikely scenario), it would have to be blackbird song – beautiful, haunting, ever-changing, and, for me, the sound of spring in a Surrey garden.

Frog City

Frog City on the Basingstoke Canal

Guest post by Simon Hughes   

Walking a ten-mile stretch of the Basingstoke Canal on an unseasonably mild day, bird life on and around the  water was abundant, including a kingfisher. A brimstone fluttered upwards and violets, primroses and celandine were making their first appearance.  For a long while, there was a fisherman every fifteen yards or so but they seemed to only be catching tiddlers. In any case, the murkiness of the canal combined with the bright sky reflections made it difficult to see any life in the canal. 

That was until I passed the last fisherman, when out of the corner of my eye, I thought I saw a few bubbles rising through the reedy vegetation at the side of the canal. Closer inspection revealed the bubbles were a couple of frogs bobbing up and down. Even closer inspection revealed that it wasn't a couple of frogs but many dozens in the vegetation. I had discovered Frog City. Perhaps the vegetation offered a prop for resting in the sun that was easy to escape from should a predator, or nosy human, hove too close.

Moving along the bank, I saw more and more frogs sunning themselves and occasionally popping up or down. Eventually, I came to a single huge conglomeration of frogspawn, clearly of different maturities since the "black dots" were of different size. There were more frogs amongst the spawn than anywhere else. And while I was watching, one jumped on top of another. I'm not sure it was a happy pairing since the jumped upon flailed its legs violently . But all that did was to encourage more frogs to leap on the pair. I felt obliged to leave them to their business. That day, apart from Frog City, I saw nothing else moving in the canal.

Snakes alive

Most people walking across the Common never see the snakes basking a few metres from their feet. For the snakes, and for many of the people, this is probably a good thing. But for a few of us who admire their sinuous beauty, these few weeks in March are a long-awaited spring spectacle.

Adders lie in little coils at the foot of scrub islands in the meadow, half hidden among the moss, dead grass and leaves. They often curl up together for warmth, in what look to human eyes like affectionate entwinings. From a distance you'd guess they were heaps of dog poo (which suddenly disappear from view unless you approach on tiptoes).

Grass snakes are much more elusive, a truly shy creature and lighting-fast when they shoot under cover. I hear them much more often than I see them. But yesterday I spotted a rather torpid one waiting to absorb some heat from fleeting sunbursts on a cold afternoon. Look closely at the photograph and you'll see that it's lying on top of an adder. I've seen these two species basking close together before, but never actually touching. Clearly, neither sees the other as a threat.

Fire trees

On a bitterly cold day, in brilliant sunshine, I walked among the fire trees on Ashtead Common. Twelve years ago fire raged through the Common for three days, destroying hundreds of veteran oaks. Flames took hold in a deep layer of dry bracken, defying efforts to extinguish them.

Some remnants of the burnt oaks remain as silent witnesses to the destruction. These monoliths, scorched and bleached amputees, create a bizarre landscape. In summer they watch over a herd of chocolate-brown Sussex cattle. In autumn bracken rollers crush the scrub at their feet, removing tinder for any future flame.

Look inside these hulks and you will find the remains of wasp and hornet nests, beetle burrows and deep hollows which once sheltered bats and birds. In this dead wood, you can read the history of the trees and the life of the Common.

In the winter landscape the fire trees stand proud against the sky, dominating the high pasture and casting deep shadows. They are like the grand old men of the Common, watching over it and offering a poignant warning against the destructive power of fire. There is something both beautiful and terrible about them. 

Blue sky thinking

Sky-blue sky over the Common today as I stood dazzled by the sun reflecting off the Great Pond. A heron stood statue-like on the shore, then flew over the water like some prehistoric beast. Further on I spotted an unlikely buttefly fluttering through the bare twigs of a tree. I may be going mad but I'm pretty sure it wasn't a leaf - probably a red admiral woken briefly from hibernation. Overhead a flock of long-tailed tits called my attention with their metallic tweets.