Light at the end of the mammal tunnel

As I was walking back up to the house from the fields yesterday evening, I noticed the mammal tunnels, and as we hadn’t checked them for a week or so, I had a quick peek inside. To my continued disappointment, our carefully prepared paper was still blank and the bait was still untouched. I toyed with the idea of moving them to a different location, but decided instead that I would get Maddie to rebait them after school tomorrow with the hotdogs I had bought especially and see if that would bring better results.

This morning however, as I was taking the bins out, I had another quick look, and to my surprise and probably unnecessary excitement, I saw footprints. Maddie was equally excited as we removed the paper and took it up to the house to identify our visitor’s prints.

This wasn’t as easy as we’d hoped. We managed to rule out otter, pine marten and polecat among others, but to be honest, a lot of the smaller, more common mammals have very similar prints. We’ve decided that we’re going to claim they’re hedgehog prints, as this seems a better option than the other real possibility, the brown rat. What do you think?

We will rebait and re-ink this evening, in the hope that we have a regular visitor or two.