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.