End of year review - Video 6

This is the last of my end-of-year trail camera videos and is my favourite.  I don't often target roe deer because they aren't very interesting subjects - they usually just wander past the camera.  A fair amount of planning went into this.  I knew the twins were about and I used two cameras to cover a bigger field of view.  Even then it turned better than I had hoped.

End of year review - Video 5

Like the water shrew of three days ago this was another new target for the trail camera and another one I came across by accident.  I had put a stake in the stream bed to support a camera looking for otters and noticed that a kingfisher was using it as a perch while looking for fish.  So I put in another stake with another camera to watch the top of the first stake.  And this was the result.

End of year review - Video 4

Trail cameras have the obvious advantage of being able to show us things we could never see for ourselves.  I have been following the local otters for most of the last three years, seeing what they get up to and which animals are about whilst only occasionally getting a glimpse of one myself.  This year there was a lot of courtship behaviour in mid February so I was expecting the young to be born in mid April and for the cub(s) to be following the mother around from mid October.  In the end the first sight of cubs was early November but they were smaller than I expected, still being carried around by the mother two weeks later.  A few days later heavy rain led to flooding and I fear that two of the three cubs were swept away.  This video was recorded about a month ago and shows one cub going for a brief swimming lesson with its mother.  It is still very small and isn't really able to keep up through the leaves.  Since then I haven't seen any further sign of it but the lake has been frozen so mother may be keeping it safe somewhere.  If it does survive we shall know about it from the trail cameras.

End of year review - Video 3

I made a new small mammal trail camera box last year and I have been using it a lot this year, mainly in the hope of seeing a weasel or a stoat but so far without luck.  From time to time I put a few sunflower seeds in so that it will smell of mice and voles to attract the predators.  The box has seen wood mice, bank voles, field voles, common shrews, pygmy shrews and brown rats, as well as robins, wrens and great tits.  The two mammals I am most pleased with are field voles which come in when the box is in the meadow and pygmy shrews which come in if the box is in the copse.

The pygmy shrew is Britain's smallest mammal and is quite widespread but very hard to see.  In fact I don't think I have ever seen one other than on a trail camera or in a Longworth trap.  It is good to know they are here in the garden even if I don't see them.

End of year review - Video 2

This was a new target for the trail camera, one I came across by accident.  I was recording an otter hunting for frogs and the camera repeatedly had what appeared at first to be false triggers. When I looked closely there was a tiny water shrew swimming through the edge of the picture.  I found where the burrow / nest was and set up another camera with a close-focus lens to watch the shrew.  There were lots of fascinating recordings including this one of the water shrew eating its prey in its larder.  Food-caching behaviour in water shrews was known about but this video may be the first time it was recorded.  Ever.  Anywhere.  Amazing.

End of year review - Video 1

It has been a good year for the trail cameras so over the next six days I'll post my six favourite videos from 2022.  I'll start with an otter.  There are plenty to choose from, including several recordings in daylight.  I like this one because the otter appeared briefly at the edge of the screen to trigger the camera (edited out here), moved back momentarily, and then made an entrance.  (Usually the animal is already in view at the start of the recording.)  The otter is very aware of the camera even in its passive daylight mode.

Merry Christmas

Making tracks on OtterCam

One of my ambitions has been to get a good video of an otter in snow, something I haven't yet achieved.  The closest was a couple of years ago when the lens was partly covered by snow.  It has been pretty cold recently but although the lake froze we have had only a few flurries of snow, enough to make tracks but not quite what I was after.  When I went to check on the cameras I could see that an otter had been past but there were also fox tracks.  Here the fox had gone to the left and the otter to the right.  There are moorhen prints as well.

A little farther on on the ice here is the otter's trail, footprints and a tail drag.

And here it is on video.  It is a short clip so I have made two versions, one with one camera and one with two.  I am not sure which I prefer.

The fox tracks were going to the left and were overlapping.

The camera shows the reason - the fox went out onto the ice and returned almost immediately. There was a 12 second gap between going and returning which I have edited out.

A couple of days earlier another fox had gone out onto the ice in the same place so I made a short clip of that as well.  The one above had a big white tip to its tail.  This one has a small black tip.  Both have long black socks on their front legs.

The last video gives us the opportunity to compare the body size and shape of the otter and the fox in the same position at the same distance from the camera.  The two will be about the same weight (～10kg) but the otter is much lower with short powerful legs.  It's a pity a badger didn't come along to complete the comparison.

I saw only one set of otter tracks - no smaller prints - but I am still hoping one cub has survived. We'll know one way or another in the next few weeks.

Winter water birds

It has been very cold for the past few days and the local ponds and lakes are frozen.  All, that is, apart from one end of Kilingworth Lake, a mile from here.  There the birds have manage to keep a patch of open water and there are hundreds of them crowded in.  I didn't get worthwhile photos of all of them but the birds I saw included black-headed gull, Canada goose, common gull, coot, gadwall, goldeneye, herring gull, little grebe, mallard, moorhen, mute swan, pochard, shoveler, and tufted duck.  They were all very close in and very hungry, so prepared to tolerate humans.  It was a great opportunity to see them close up and to take a few photos.

For example, it isn't often I see a goldeneye this close.

The most numerous duck was tufted duck.

I also saw a few male pochards.

And mallards.

The gadwalls weren't joining the party, preferring to take a nap on the ice.

Other partypoopers were shovelers.

I am used to seeing shovelers on the water but I hadn't realised how small they are until I saw this one next to a mallard.

Gulls present were black-headed gulls,

herring gulls,

and one first-winter common gull.

While I was watching several people brought food for the birds.  The swans and gulls in particular saw them coming and raced across to meet them.  The ducks, coots and geese joined in the scrum.

The thaw started today so the birds will be able to spread out across the lake again or disperse to nearby ponds and lakes.

Sparrowhawk news

It is hard to believe I have gone over a year without writing a post about sparrowhawks.  The current bird is a real nuisance because he won't sit on the sparrowhawk perch in the kitchen garden as the others have done over the past five winters.  This one visits the garden every day but mostly hunts around the feeders outside the kitchen window.  I have put in a post for him to sit on but it is a much more open situation so he rarely stops for more than a few seconds (after an unsuccessful strike) so he isn't easy to photograph.

He will more often sit up in the branches when it is even more difficult get a photo.

When the oak tree fell on the house in Storm Arwen a year ago the sparrowhawk then (perhaps the same one) would sit right outside the kitchen window, only a metre or two away.

The 6th National Otter Survey of England

When I was a lad otters were nearly extinct in England.  Sadly, the first people to realise were otter hunters who found there weren't any left to hunt.  The main reason wasn't the hunting but cumulative pesticide toxicity, with other hazards being water pollution and habitat loss.  With the banning of Dieldrin etc, legal protection, and improving water quality otter the population has slowly recovered and they are now widespread.  Although there were no surveys to recognise their decline, five national surveys have taken place in England in 77-79, 84-86, 91-94, 00-02 and 09-10 to keep an eye on what is happening.  Mostly it has been good news.  Although there were re-introductions in Yorkshire, East Anglia and Thames, much of the otter population recovery has been natural and they are now found in most of the country apart from the South East.  Details of the survey methodology have changed over the years but this chart gives a good idea of the recovery.

This was the situation in the first survey with a few otters in the South West and on the Welsh border and hardly any elsewhere.

This is how England looked in the last survey.  Things were promising in the North East and South West but not in the South East.

Separate surveys are undertaken in Wales and Scotland.  Worryingly the recent sixth survey in Wales found 22% fewer signs of the animals in nearly all waterways.  Although there isn't a direct relationship between field signs and the number of otters, the report concludes that there are fewer otters in Wales.  The reasons for the decline are unclear but, being at the top of the food chain, otters are particularly susceptible to accumulation of toxins and chemicals which are now widespread in rivers and waterways, similar in a way to the problems in the 1960s and 70s. The last national survey in Scotland was in 1991-94.

The sixth National Otter Survey of England is now underway.  It is being organised by the Mammal Society and is funded by the Environment Agency and Natural England. Half of the country is being surveyed by professionals and the other half by volunteers.  England is divided into 100km squares and the north east and south west quarters of each square are being surveyed by volunteers.  Each 50km square contains 25 10km squares, and I have been surveying one of them.  Take-up of squares has been pretty good across the country apart from those east of Northampton, north of Peterborough and east of London.

All the squares in the North were taken pretty quickly so I took SP65 in Northamptonshire where my mother lives.  It mostly involves the villages of Weedon Bec, Flore, Nether Heyford, Bugbrooke and Kislingbury along the upper reaches of the River Nene west of Northampton.  As otters are shy and mainly nocturnal and sightings are rare, the survey involves selecting and visiting ten sites within each square to look for signs of otters - spraint (droppings) and footprints.

The best places to look for spraint are under bridges where there is a horizontal structure near the base.  Recent heavy rain makes it likely any signs have been washed away but makes it easier to find footprints.  Not all the bridges I checked were suitable as on some the pillars went straight down into the water.  Others did have a horizontal ledge and there I found spraint, proof of the presence of otters.

Elsewhere I found footprints although they weren't easy to photograph on my phone.

I found more spraint at Kislingbury on the rocks below the weir.

In the end four of the ten sites in my square had signs of otters.  The survey only requires evidence of otters in one location in a 10km square to be positive but my next step was to set up a trail camera.  Last Friday I put a camera under the bridge in the centre of Weedon Bec.  A dog otter visited the camera just after midnight and triggered the camera before appearing, making a high quality but brief video.  It slipped back into the water with barely a ripple.

On Saturday a second camera was 200m downstream in the tunnel where the river goes under the canal.  I knew there would be an otter on the video because when I collected the camera I could see otter tracks going right up to it and then past.

The video starts with a freeze frame so we can get a better look because the otter was very close by the time recording began.  It sniffed around and departed in a puff of steam.

Although otters probably don't contribute directly to biodiversity they are key indicators of water quality and of the health of the environment.  The otter survey runs until January with results to be published later next year.  I am pleased to have made a small contribution to the data collection.