Thank you to all our volunteers who turned out on a rainy Sunday morning to look for harvest mice on our Clark Fields site. It was a great event, and after just a couple of hours of searching we were rewarded with our first two nests on at this location.

The survey was led by ecologist Simon Breeze who has been helping us to gather baseline data on the site, and who has been slowly working his way through the fields looking for harvest mice, but these were the first we found, and its safe to say we were all very excited.

Harvest mice are wonderful little animals - they are the only European mammals with prehensile tails and they can hang and clamber around the brambles like tiny monkeys. Sadly they have been in decline across Britain in recent decades. Listed as ‘near-threatened’ they are a Biodiversity Action Plan species in the UK, so it is great to know they are about, and it seems likely that they will be able to expand rapidly in the future as our site wilds up. Until now they have been confined to tiny strips of rough ground and hedges. Now that grazing and cutting has ceased they should find their potential habitat expanding a hundred-fold as the fields start to rough up.

The process of looking for them is simple - but you need to know what you are looking for. Rather than look for the mice, we look for abandoned nests, gently turning over tussocks and looking for the characteristic balls of spun grass.

This is what they look like. This image was not taken on the day but is of a captive bred mouse.

Harvest mice at Clark Fields

We’ve dug some scrapes