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.