Rats in the chicken run

 

One of a family of brown rats Rattus norvegicus living under a hen house at Home Farm in Beamish museum, entertaining visitors with their antics last Sunday, dashing out to eat a broken hen’s egg.

Rats have a liking for eggs. My grandmother, who worked on a farm, lived in what was then a very rural part of Sussex, with food stored in a larder. As a child it upset me that she prevented birds from building nests in her garden hedge, but she had a fear that rats might come for the eggs and then would find their way into her house.

We have an acquaintance who lives in a house next to a smallholding where the owner keeps several breeds of animals and stores feed that often attracts rats. They are highly intelligent omnivores and will eat most things that they can digest. Last autumn we watched them from her upstairs window, as they climbed her apple tree, nibbled through the stalks of ripe apples, then rolled the fallers downhill, through the hedge, to supplement their animal feed diet.

A sobering statistic: female brown rats begin to breed at three months old and can produce three litters of up to twelve offspring each year.

Wood mouse opportunist

I've finally taken the bird feeders down in the garden, because there's plenty of natural food available now that spring has arrived. That means that this wood mouse, that hid amongst the flower pots near the back door and raced out to pick up the seeds that the birds scattered, will also need to look elsewhere for a free meal.

There are always wood mice in the garden, usually living in the log piles, but they do occasionally find their way indoors. We've caught five in humane traps since Christmas and released them into a hedgerow about a mile away, hoping that they won't find their way back indoors. I wrote about them in the Guardian Country Diary last week.

Bank vole

I usually only have fleeting glimpses of bank voles, but thanks to a fellow walker along the Deerness Valley Way in County Durham I had a good view of this one. Every day this kind-hearted benefactor leaves small handfuls of food for birds on rocks along this former railway line. Today the bank vole found the free handout irresistible, even though there's an abundance of autumnal natural food all around. This tiny mammal needs to be careful though - kestrels and barn owls also hunt along here.

 

Chilled roe deer

Most of my encounters with roe deer have been brief - often just a bobbing white tail disappearing through the trees. But this one, near Romaldkirk in Teesdale, was different: we stood, looking at each other for a couple of minutes, before the deer slowly turned away and ambled into an old hazel coppice. 

One of those privileged encounters I'm likely to remember for a long time, on an early autumn day when the sunlight showed off to perfection the beautiful coat of this gentle animal.

Britain's Largest Woodlouse and a dozy seal

Today's Guardian Country Diary describes encounters with two very interesting animals during a stroll on Roker Pier at Sunderland. Here's the pier, below, on a calm, sunny day.

This sea slater Ligia oceanica had crawled out of a crack between the stone blocks on the pier. They usually do most of their feeding at dusk, grazing on algae, and you don't often see them in the open in broad daylight. This is Britain's largest woodlouse species and it's confined to areas just above the high water mark on the seashore. The coin is a 10 pence piece, 25mm. in diameter, so you can get an idea of the animal's size - about four times larger than a garden woodlouse.

These little animals are very well camouflaged, especially when they hunker down so that the skirts of their armour plates are pressed close to the ground and they cast no shadow. It matched the stone so well that it was very lucky that I didn't tread on it.

The most remarkable thing about sea slaters is the ease and speed with which they change colour, due to being able to expand and contract pigment spots in their cuticle, so that they match their background. This is the same animal as the one on the grey stone, after it had been kept on a white background in bright sunlight for a few minutes. The pigment spots have contracted and it's almost translucent.

Sea slaters have large eyes for a woodlouse, perhaps because they do most of their feeding at dusk.

The sea slaters that live between the granite blocks here are often pummelled by waves that break over the pier (see picture below) but can maintain a tenacious grip on the stone with those needle-sharp bristles on the tip of their legs. Their flattened shape is perfect for squeezing into the gaps between the stone blocks.

You can see the jaws quite nicely here, and also the pigment spots in the body armour, fully contracted so they are just small brown dots.

We might have missed this character too if it hadn't raised a flipper to have a scratch. It was sunbathing on Roker beach below the pier and its smooth outline and mottled colouring made it surprisingly inconspicuous against the sand and rocks at low tide. I wonder if seals dream when they are asleep? If so, then it's probably having a very satisfying fantasy about pursuing fat, succulent salmon.

I'd guess that this grey seal must have been born on the Farne Islands last autumn. It had been left high up on Roker beach by an extremely high equinoctial spring tide. It didn't seem to be at all concerned and was content to bask in the sun and wait for the tide to return.  

Lovely animal, isn't it?

This is Roker pier a week later. Somewhere between the granite blocks, under the waves, there'll be sea slaters hunkered down. As for the seal, that'll be somewhere out to sea.

Wee, sleekit, cowran, tim'rous beastie....

Unlike the animal in Robert Burns' famous poem To a Mouse, this character is a wee, cunning, devious, cocky beastie because it's taken me four days to catch it. On three separate nights it managed to take the bait from the live mammal trap without tripping the trap door, but last night it finally put a foot wrong and imprisoned itself.

Many of the threats to a mouse come from overhead, from kestrels and owls, and you can see here how well those bulging, upward pointing eyes and ears are disposed for detecting any threatening movements from above. That's a fine set of whiskers too, capable of detecting the slightest vibration and helping their owner to find its way around in darkness.

It was living in the cupboard under our stairs but this Houdini mouse has now been relocated to a local woodland, where wood mice belong. No more freeloading on sultana and peanut bait.

It seems to have been doing well on its luxury diet, judging from that fine, glossy coat - which it will need tonight; more snow forecast.

For more info on wood mice, click here

Foxy

I found this picture of the fox that used to sunbath on my father-in-law's garage roof when I was searching back through some old picture files, taken back in 2007. Since then he's had a succession of semi-tame foxes visiting his North Lincolnshire garden. Currently one comes to the patio windows to be fed. Who knows, maybe it's a descendant of this one?

A Tiny Mammal with Iron-tipped Teeth ...

I found these photographs of a pygmy shrew Sorex minutus when I was sorting through some pictures that I took back in the autumn of 2006.

We encountered this delightful little animal, which is the smallest British native shrew, when we were walking in Hamsterley Forest in County Durham. From a distance it looked like a tiny ball of fur zig-zagging along the path. It seemed oblivious to our presence so I spent the next five minutes on my knees, trying to follow every move while it relentlessly searched the vegetation for prey. It never stayed still for a second and turned out to be one of the most infuriating animals that I've ever tried to photograph - these are the only sharp(ish) images from about 40 that I took. Following it, as my knees got wetter and muddier, and my language became more colourful, provided a lot of amusement for the family. 

With those tiny eyes, I suspect that pygmy shrew's vision isn't very acute and it must rely on that wonderful array of whiskers - like radar antennae - on its elongated nose for locating prey.

You can see the tail quite well here, which is surprisingly large for such a tiny creature. I've read that individuals that survive through the winter lose the hairs on their tails in their spring moult, so this must be a youngster.

Apparently pygmy shrews, like common shrews, have red-tipped teeth, due to iron deposits that reinforce the tips. 

 You can see the array of whiskers quite nicely in this image. The use of flash for the photograph makes the coat look much lighter than it seemed in normal daylight.

Pygmy shrews' lives consist of alternating periods of rest and intense foraging, when they need to find enough food to compensate for their very high metabolic rate. They need to consume about one and quarter times their own body weight in prey items every day, just to survive. After five minutes whizzing around in front of the camera this one disappeared down a hole under a tree root, presumably for a snooze.

The Price of Success

I photographed this grey squirrel on Wimbledon Common on Sunday, where it was scavenging picnic leftovers and delighting young children with its antics.

People have strong opinions about grey squirrels. There are some, who refer to them as grey ‘tree rats’, who would like to see them exterminated in Britain ……………… but back at the end of the nineteenth century there were plenty of landowners who had the same attitude towards native red ‘tree rats’. In 1903 the Highland Squirrel Club was formed  and over the next 30 years killed 85,000 red squirrels in an attempt to protect their forests from what was then seen as a pest. Earlier still, in the 1830s, 20,000 red sqirrels were sold annually by butchers in Leadenhall and Newgate markets in London, anticipating today's growing trade in grey squirrel meat.

I guess there’s a lesson in there somewhere – that it doesn’t pay any wildlife in Britain – native or introduced – to be too successful. Himalayan balsam, Canada geese, ring-necked parakeets, ruddy ducks, sparrowhawks, ivy, foxes, magpies and even peregrine falcons, red kites and sea eagles – to name but a few – have all become the focus of wildlife zealots because they are just too successful. I can see the sense in defending remaining strongholds of red squirrels against their grey counterparts, but elsewhere it seems pointless to expend resources on killing them at the same time as our affluent, effluent society provides them with virtually unlimited food resources in our garbage.

Maybe the lesson for grey squirrels is to adopt a lower profile - as this one seemed to be doing......