Small mammal trapping

This morning I had to be up early, which I am not good at, to go to my Get Grubby Gang meeting. Our group is part of the Gloucestershire Wildlife Trust and we get together to learn about local wildlife.

Last night some of the adult leaders set up live traps and positioned them in the hedges around a playing field, they marked the trap locations with colourful pipe cleaners so they were easy to find again. Today we found the traps one at time and checked if the trap door was open or closed. If the door was open then it meant no animal had visited it. When we found a trap that was closed it was very exciting as we knew something was inside but we had to empty the trap to find out what it was. The first trap contained a field vole, we recognised this as it had a long tail but it's ears were flat to it's head rather than sticking up like a mouse. The field vole was quite calm when we observed it, I thought it was rather cute and cuddly, it looked like it had enjoyed it's night in the trap with it's warm nest of hay and free supply of food.

The next closed trap had a different small mammal inside, this one made my Mum squeal as it was a wood mouse! It was extremely jumpy and desperate to be released, which we did quickly.

We found several more voles in the traps but they were bank voles, these had much longer tails than the field voles.

I learnt that voles like to eat roots, seeds, snails and leaves but they themselves are prey to larger animals such as owls, kestrels and weasels.