A spy in the hedgerow

One thing I have in my favour in attempting to complete this challenge together is that I am a Mammal Ecologist by trade, therefore I have a few tricks up my sleeve for easy ways to spot different species. One of these is the small mammal camera trap box – a simple wooden box to which a camera trap is attached at one end with a close-focus lens, and a pile of food placed at the other end. We duly set one up and placed in the dense shrubby hedge in our back garden overnight.

Bingo!  One very busy woodmouse captured coming and going all night and well into the next morning, extracting one tasty morsel at a time. The girls were so excited to see the footage on screen, although admittedly began to drift off after the first 50 or so 30-second clips of the same animal. Nevertheless, this brings us one step closer to our aim.

I had been hoping for a little more diversity in the garden than this - when I used the same set up last autumn I captured rat and hedgehog too even tho the builders had been with us since July and our garden was increasingly full with their paraphernalia, but even leaving the camera out for additional nights didn't increase our yield, and the front garden gave the same results, albeit probably with a different individual.

Find out more about woodmice here

British mammal tally: 2

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