I knew we were leaving finding our last seven species right up to the last minute, but I had a cunning and (hopefully) fool-proof plan... I scheduled a job involving Longworth trapping of small mammals at a site where last year we found a plethora of species to finish on a Saturday morning, meaning I could take along at least one willing helper!
On the way into site Turtle herself noticed a brown hare nestled into the stubble and new shoots of the winter wheat, getting our day's tally off to a fine start. We had 60 live-capture traps to check in addition to three small-mammal camera trap boxes, and in the days before had already had four separate species.
We were not disappointed! Turtle was soon off, happily finding the trap points, collecting in the traps and pointing out the distinguishing features for each of the animals we caught. We had a flurry of field voles to begin with, shortly followed by bank voles and woodmice in the traps.
We were also confident that there were harvest mice on site and with the help of a colleague soon found an abandoned nest which was later confirmed by siting a live harvest mouse on one of the small mammal camera traps. With the addition of common shrew and a brief glimpse of a pygmy shrew on camera, and evidence of dormouse from another site, we calculate our final total to be a healthy 27 different species with one whole day to spare!
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