Journey IV: Knapdale

I'm just back from an eventful fieldtrip over on the western coast of Scotland: I saw my first otter, got up before dawn everyday to survey bats and had a close encounter with a short-eared owl at 5.30am. We carried out a small mammal survey - something which has been done every year for 15 years by students on the same fieldtrip - and so I got to handle (and photograph) woodmice and bank voles:

Traps baited with oats were set every evening; the trapped mouse or vole then spends the night in the trap which is lined with fresh straw and contains pieces of apple for them to eat. In the morning the traps are carefully emptied, the mammals are then weighed and a tiny piece of the fur is clipped (to ensure they are not counted twice) and then they are released. The woodmice were incredibly fast lively, but the voles were much more chilled and just continued eating or grooming themselves during the weighing and clipping process.

We paid a visit to the Knapdale beaver trial site and I marvelled at the beavers' dam, which is 30m long and about 1m high. The resulting flooding had filled a valley and made a strange landscape, the like of which has not been seen in Scotland for 400 years:

I savoured the early autumn atmosphere:

Camera Critters