Yahoo News ES Views: Wild London: Small animals are the woods’ friends
Counting wildlife isn’t easy, especially when it’s small, extremely shy and tends only to venture out at night. Welcome to Vole Patrol, London Wildlife Trust’s attempt to survey the small, woodland mammals in parts of west London.
The tiny animals in question — shrews, voles and wood mice — are an important part of a natural woodland ecosystem. The shrews control invertebrate numbers; the wood mice and voles help to redistribute seeds and nuts, allowing plants to spread; and all fall prey to some of London’s rarer wild predators, such as stoat, weasel, kestrel and owls.
Over an 18-month period, the trust’s staff and a large volunteer team used specialist traps and tracking devices to survey nine London woods, discovering common shrews, pygmy shrews, wood mice, yellow-necked mice, bank voles and field voles — six different species — each with their own special lifestyles.
Wood mice were the most commonly found, but that’s not surprising when a hard-working wood mouse mum can raise up to 28 young in a single year. Our woods would be overrun if it weren’t for their short lives, with few surviving more than two years. Bank vole were also relatively abundant, but the survey revealed that many of our woods aren’t so good for the other species, with far fewer recorded.
We tend to take woods and nature for granted, but the way we protect and manage wild spaces can have huge knock-on effects on wildlife. The Vole Patrol study found that for a small woodland mammal, an ideal home would be a richly vegetated wood with open sunlit glades, lots of fruit and nut-producing trees such as hawthorn, hazel and oak, alongside plentiful leaf litter, scattered logs and tree stumps.
And that also sounds like a great choice for a refreshing autumnal walk this weekend.
London Wildlife Trust campaigns to protect the capital’s wildlife and wild spaces. Backed by Sir David Attenborough President Emeritus of The Wildlife Trusts.
