Island 2000 Trust Blog

You might remember a few weeks ago we were off to try out Simon’s hairtubes to see if we could find evidence of Dormice at a site. Well, one of the tubes turned up a few strands (and all the peanut butter bait was gone) so something must have crawled through. Here’s a microscope image (not great as it’s taken by pressing the digital camera into the eyepiece and trying not to wobble). It does seem to show typical Dormouse hair structure - closed oval cells (the dark blobs). It’s not exactly conclusive, but interesting.

Here you can see us baiting the Dormouse hair-tubes with crunchy peanut butter and taping them up in likely spots - places where there is plenty of tangled cover with fruit, nut and berry-bearing species and honeysuckle in particular. We’ll be back in a week to check for little hairs and naked mice.

Here’s a handy I2K invention, and made entirely from recycled birch too. These are Water Vole spoons. “Don’t they have cutlery of their own?” I hear you cry. Yes of course, but that’s not the point. These are for jamming into river banks water so that the spoon bit lays out just over the water; we bait them with apple, come back the next day and scoop up the droppings left over from the feast-on-the-spoon. Water Vole’s are really rather secretive and hard to survey for, but they do have fairly distinctive droppings and what’s more we create a little mud on the platform, Water Vole footprints

are excellent i.d.