Hmph.

Sadly, there's no follow up on the traps from yesterday.  The (usually incredibly reliable) car wouldn't start this morning.  Here's hoping that the OH can sort it for tomorrow...

On the bright side, I really needed to do some business-type stuff.  So I did that instead.  The time hasn't been lost, at least, but I can't help but feel I've really missed out.  I was really looking forward to it too.

Oh well.  Keep on swimming...

It's a TRAP!

This afternoon I popped over to The Barn Countryside Centre in Manchester for a couple of hours.  This afternoon's activity with the Greater Manchester Ecology Unit was laying out traps for checking tomorrow.

Firstly we were introduced to two different traps -- Longmans (top), which I've already talked about before (and got a picture of this time!) and tube traps (bottom):

The Longmans and the tube traps both work on the same principle:  Open door with food.  Small mammal enters, hits a trip, which closes the door.  In the tube trap, this trip is the white bar at the top (the paddle at the bottom is the door).  Longman traps cost around £60, but tube traps cost around £20.  However, tube traps don't do so well in the wet as the door doesn't necessarily function properly because the plastic sticks, so it's all about when and where you're using them.

We took out 30 Longman traps and baited them with seed and dog food.  The dog food is added for your insectivorous types, i.e. shrews.  I have to admit to putting quite a large teaspoon in due to residual guilt of previous trappings.  We also added a tennis ball sized amount of bedding in the form of hay and dried grass.

We laid out three transects of 10, spaced at 5m intervals.  On our way out to lay the Longmans, we passed by some hedgehog tunnels that had been laid out.  Two of them had been pulled into the path and the sausages had been nicked, presumably by dogs.  Shame.

Tomorrow morning, we'll get to see what turns up!

Small Mammal Trapping

Today I went small mammal trapping in Stockport with the Greater Manchester Ecology Unit.  It was a morning collection, so we were picking up the contents of traps laid out last night.  Sadly I wasn't able to help out yesterday due to teaching on my only Thursday all year.  This was double sadly as I'd also been offered both an evening and a morning bat survey by a firm, but so it goes.  Keep on swimming...

The traps that we were using were humane traps -- Longworths to be precise.  It's been some time since I used them, but they're awesome little things.  They don't hurt the little critters at all as long as you stock up the trap with a good deal of food and warmth, which is precisely the kind of thing that these creatures are after in the first place.  The traps look like this:

(Image from University of Aberdeen as I forgot to snap one...)

They come complete with a little door and everything.  The mammal survey at Etherow was two transects of 20 traps set at 10m intervals.  The first transect was near a field margin and had largely been disturbed by either dogs or badgers -- both were really likely in that part of the woods.  We did manage to get our hands on one that wasn't disturbed and that had caught a woodmouse (Apodemus sylvaticus).  In order to get a good looksee, you have to dump the trap into a plastic bag, which gives you a confused looking mouse, looking up at you:

On this survey, we were recording the state of the trap (disturbed, open, closed); what, if anything, we caught; mortality and any other notes (juvenile/adult, gender).  We also took hair samples from the mice for DNA analysis for a study of genetic drift in populations of mice.

The second transect, which was up in more dense woodland and off a path, yielded more variety as we also found bank voles.  These chaps are a far more reddy brown than woodmice.  They've also got smaller ears by comparison and have (I think) a blunter, less refined muzzle.  We caught a juvie (so small!):  

And we shall call him Bitey, because that's exactly what he did to the lass who was holding him.

We also caught and sexed a couple of others, which were mostly male.  Apparently, if you hold them a certain way, the vole stops struggling and you can tell it's gender: 

 
And this one I shall call Peevish, because he looks not only indignant, but peeved.

We didn't catch any shrews, which is a first for me, but also makes me quite happy.  Shrews have such a fast metabolism that unless you cram the trap with food and rescue it sharpish, they starve to death.  In fact, they can die of starvation in only 5 hours as they need to eat up to 300% of their own body weight every day.  To do this, they must eat every 2-3 hours.  That's one hell of a downside, but they do eat everything and anything -- including canned hotdog sausages.

Canned hotdog sausages are great bait for hedgehog traps.  These traps don't trap the animal, but they do attract them and cause them to walk through either ink or some kind of paw print capturing surface for ID purposes.  The trap below used a mixture of ink and washing up liquid, with paper to capture prints and a hotdog as bait:

These traps were laid out as one transect of 10 traps, along the edge of a path, with one trap every 100m.  We think that the first trap may have had a shrew in it, but that's only a maybe based on paw prints and teeth marks.  We also found evidence of bank voles and woodmice in the other traps -- did I mention that I can now ID rodent poo?  Well, I can now for these two species. We also found slugs in some of the traps as well as evidence that one of the little critters had pulled the hotdog out of the trap and off somewhere.  Inky dragmarks are a dead giveaway!

Sadly, we saw no evidence of hedgehogs.  I do not know if this is normal for this site, but I do know that hedgehogs are in decline but no one really knows how much by.  Here's hoping that either they went to ground last night or that they just never really liked that site.

All in all, it was a really interesting and productive day.  Incidentally, Etherow had a diverse amount of fungi about, so it's well worth a further investigation.

Bats at Delamere

This last weekend was pretty busy as I went along to Chesire Wildlife Trust's Bat & Moth evening as well as taking a day out at Yorkshire Sculpture Park.  On the upside, that makes for quite a few articles.  On the downside, that makes for no time in which to write them, especially when you consider that I work part-time as a lecturer and it's enrollment week!

Friday's Bat & Moth evening was pretty nifty, split into a bat watch and walk, as well as an introduction to moths and moth trapping, so I'm going to do a few entries on it in a similar way.

The bat watch & walk was really interesting and informative, though a bit more technical information about the frequency ranges of the bats we were picking up on the bat detectors would have been more helpful -- but you can't have everything.  We did an emergence watch and saw quite a few brown long-eared bats (Plecotus auritus) leaving their roosts in one of the older buildings at Delamere.  They were really loud at the 43 kHz range on the bat detectors, which is no surprise as their call range is 27-56 kHz.  However, it's really worth noting that you'll see these critters before you hear them usually as the detectors only work on their quiet calls up to a distance of 6m, hence their other name, whispering bats.  A good daylight indicator of these chaps being around is moth wings under the roost (most favoured moth being the Yellow Underwing) and of course, bat droppings on the wall.

As soon as they left the roost, they immediately headed for the closest tree to feed.  They are gleaning feeders, meaning that they eat the insects that alight on leaves and tree bark.  Unfortunately, as it was a bit dark and the bats were a bit far away (who'd've thought, eh?) I wasn't able to get any pictures of any bats that evening, however, here's a picture from wikimedia commons of what a brown long-eared bat looks like:

They look far more charismatic as a species when they're moving and not stunned.  Bad photos even happen to bats, apparently!

The next bats we fleetingly saw and certainly heard were the pipistrelles.  There are two types of pipistrelle -- the common pipistrelle (Pipistrellus pipistrellus) and the soprano pipestrelle (Pipistrellus pygmaeus).  The main identifying difference if you're spotting using a detector is that the common pips have a call with most energy at 45kHz, whereas the soprano pips have a higher echolocation call at 55kHz.  We also heard a few social calls down in the 20kHz range.  Social calls are the bat world's version of a male bat calling out "hey, ladies!", especially when you bear in mind that bats have harems. 

The calls of these bats are interesting to listen to as you can actually hear them hunting.  When they dive to catch an insect, it sounds like someone has just blown a raspberry.  When it stops, chances are that the bat is having dinner.

I'm fairly certain I also heard a Natterer (Myotis nattereri), though as the pips were around at the time and were being pretty loud, it was hard to tell.  However, it wasn't the same sound and the frequency went as high as 70kHz before suddenly stopping rather than fading out.  The lovely folks from the local bat group seemed to think it was a good possibility though.

Either way, they were amazing to watch and to hear.  It's just a shame their body-clocks are so antisocial!