Mrs Weasel moves house (and takes the family)

Another exciting day in the garden.  I saw a weasel dash across the drive by the gate, carrying something in its mouth.  Guessing it might be a kit I ran for a camera and the weasel returned within a minute or so, too quick for a photo.  Another minute or two later and it was back with another kit.  Being a weasel it was moving fast and the photography was difficult.  I was panning the camera but the weasel stopped as soon as it heard the camera so I overshot.  As soon as I found it again through the viewfinder it was off under the gate.  I didn't see it return but a couple of minutes later it was back with a third kit and the process was repeated.  I waited for ages but it didn't come back again.  The photos aren't technically very good but this was amazing to see. Here are the best of what I managed - all the rest are blurred or only show half a weasel (or none at all).

Weasels produce 4-6 kits in a brood and can have two broods in a year so given the timing I expect this is a second brood.  I only saw three kits moved but I could well have missed more at the beginning of the move.  A weasel will move its litter to another nest if it is disturbed or if there is a shortage of prey.  I wonder if this one had been nesting in my weasel wall, which has two built-in weasel nest boxes, although she shouldn't have been disturbed there.  I haven't had a camera on the wall this summer as there has been little activity in the camera box.  I checked the nest boxes last winter and they didn't look as though they had been used last year.  I have to partially dismantle the wall to get at them so I'll wait until the end of this year before having another look.  In the meantime I'll hope to see young weasels in the garden or on the trail camera when these are a bit older.

I also saw a stoat a couple of weeks ago and managed a couple of photos through the window - it isn't very big so may be a youngster.  I wonder if a stoat might have disturbed the weasels.

PS.  If you looked at my last blog on Roe deer on the otter bridge early and the videos wouldn't play it was because I had forgotten to activate them.  It was fixed later that day and the videos will play now if you haven't seen them.

Roe deer on the otter bridge

The trail cameras are set primarily to keep an eye on what the otters get up to but they record whatever comes into view.  At the moment fewer than 1% of recordings are of otters.  Non-target captures in late spring and early summer were mainly of young birds, especially water rails, moorhens and mallards, but there are plenty of mammals as well.  They now outnumber the birds and in perhaps ascending order of size they are common shrew, water shrew, bank vole, wood mouse, field vole, brown rat, grey squirrel, red fox, badger and roe deer.

Deer aren't the most exciting subjects on trail camera because they usually don't do much but the kids are charming.  They are now a couple of months old and still have some of their camouflage but they find the bridge a bit of a challenge because it is built rather like a cattle grid. If you have dainty hooves it requires a bit of concentration to get across safely.  Here are mother and the twins all managing easily this time.

Here one of the kids has discovered the camera.

Here is one of the twins showing how not to do it.  After falling through a couple of times it came back to have think but realised it was left behind and had to try again.  You can hear it squeaking as it set off a second time.

The last video shows one of the kids on the bridge.  As I said, roe deer don't do much but it is quite relaxing to watch if you have a couple of minutes to spare.

The Greater White-toothed Shrew

Well here is something new.  A new mammal, not only to my trail cameras but to the UK.  This is the Greater White-toothed Shrew (Crocidura russula), first discovered in this country only four years ago.  It came to notice when a photo of a shrew brought in by a cat in Sunderland was posted on Facebook (as you do) and was noticed by local mammalogist and ecologist Ian Bond. It looked different from any of our native shrews and was subsequently confirmed to be a new British species.  How it got here is not established but looking back at earlier photos of dead shrews(!) it has probably been present at least since 2015.

You can't see the white teeth unless you have a live-trapped or dead individual but the Greater White-toothed Shrew can be identified by being medium-sized for a shrew, having grey fur, large protruding ears, white hairs on its tail and a distinctive nose profile described as looking like a Womble or a Clanger (if you are young enough to remember those).  The zoomed-in screen grabs from video freeze-frames aren't the best quality but this is the nose shape and large ears,

and here you can make out the white tail hairs.

All these are clearer on the video.  These few clips are all I have so far and because we are looking at shrews they are fairly brief.

The camera box was placed in a scruffy area close to a hedgerow in Elemore Park, only a mile or so from Easington Lane where the original Greater White-toothed Shrew was first recorded. Although it is within Sunderland metropolitan borough it is closer to Durham.  A few interesting observations about the recordings: all were in daylight and Greater White-toothed Shrews are known to be mainly diurnal in habit; there were a few Common Shrew recordings but no Pygmy Shrews, a few Field Voles but no Bank Voles; and no Wood Mice, which is a surprise.  I had enough videos of Common and Greater White-toothed Shrews to make this short slow-motion comparison video.

The Greater White-toothed Shrew is a resident of much of Western Europe and some of the Channel Islands.  It was discovered in Ireland in 2007 and is causing concern there because as it spread it has completely displaced the native Pygmy Shrew.  The small mammal ecology of Ireland is different from ours as there is only one native shrew, one mouse (Wood Mouse) and one vole (Bank Vole, accidentally introduced in the 1920s).  The Greater White-toothed Shrew lives at much higher densities than the Pygymy Shrew and probably out-competes it by eating all the food.  Since its discovery here a monitoring programme has been put in place by the Mammal Society, mainly involving barn owl pellet dissection, to monitor the spread of the Greater White-toothed Shrew and its effect, if any, on the Pygmy Shrew - the small mammal ecology of Great Britain is different from Ireland as we have a wider range of small mammals and predators. In Ireland this is classed as an invasive species but although there is now evidence that the Greater White-toothed Shrew is spreading across County Durham the effect on Pygmy Shrews is unknown so here it is a non-native species.   Genetic analysis suggests the Sunderland shrew came from France and not from Ireland.

Our three native shrew species, Common Shrew (Sorex araneus), Pygmy Shrew (Sorex minutus) and Water Shrew (Neomys fodiens), all have red-tipped teeth whose enamel is strengthened with iron.  As a reminder, here is what they look like.  The Common Shrew is chunky in build, has only a medium length tail and is tricoloured on the sides, dark, medium and light.  The Pygmy Shrew is very small and slim with a long furry tail.  The Water Shrew is large and is black and white.

I am grateful to Anthony Hindmarch, the Elemore Park manager, for the opportunity to site my camera - we were primarily looking for weasels and voles so at least we found a field vole.  I hope to see more Greater White-toothed Shrew videos when I next check the camera and I'll post an update here.

News from OtterCam

OtterCam is in a quiet phase after a very exciting winter and spring.  The previous cubs were last seen on 02 May and their mother was seriously courting the dog otter on 04 May.  Courtship is said to last three or four days and an otter pregnancy lasts 63 days so if all went according to plan it could be that new cubs were born about two weeks ago.  Even so, we won't expect to see them on camera until some time in October.

The cameras have been keeping an eye on things and recorded this video of the female at the end of June, possibly ten days before cubs were due.  Otters have two or three cubs which are born at about 13cm in length weighing a bit over 100g (3½oz).  So, given a female otter's size (6000g) and body shape, I don't know whether we would be able to tell if this one was pregnant.

The next video was recorded 20 days later, so possibly 10 days or so after giving birth.  Again it is very difficult to tell from the video but I just wonder if there is evidence she might be feeding cubs.

In the following week the female turned up four times at this camera point to leave a scent mark. In the same time the dog otter went past just once so I expect he is elsewhere much of the time.

Micro ladybirds

The ladybirds we are all used to seeing are often red with black spots, sometimes black with red spots and occasionally yellow with black spots, all shiny.  There is another group of smaller ladybirds which are mostly unspotted and not shiny, known as inconspicuous ladybirds or micro ladybirds.  They are more difficult to find and often go unnoticed.  In the past few days I have come across four of them and have been learning how to photograph them.  The most recent find was Scymnus nigrinus which is rare with only a handful of UK records, mostly from East Anglia.   I found about ten in a group of small Scots pine trees only a few miles from here. Scymnus nigrinus is very small and is black and so is not an easy subject to photograph.  I used a small floating frame in a technique which holds the ladybird between two very thin plastic films without harming it, described in a new book Micro ladybirds of Britain and Ireland by Maria Justamond and David W.Williams.   This has the advantage of allowing a good view of the underside as in many of the micro ladybirds the underneath features help with identification.  I found the most difficult thing was avoiding reflections from the flash on the plastic and dealing with the very shallow depth of field when looking from the top.  Here is how I got on.

So, not too bad considering the ladybird is only about 2mm long and the photos are taken through a plastic film.  This is the habitat.

In the same trees I found two Scymnus suturalis.  This is another conifer specialist and is even smaller than S. nigrinus.

There is a fashion for giving all ladybirds an English name in addition to their scientific binomial. Scymnus nigrinus, not surprisingly, is also known as the Black Ladybird although some of the others have multiple names which don't always make much sense.

A few days earlier I found two other micro ladybirds in my mother's garden in Northamptonshire. It was very hot and I hadn't taken the floating frame so I had only a few moments before each of them flew off.  The first was Rhyzobius chrysomeloides, a.k.a. Arboreal Ladybird, Epaulet Ladybird, Round-keeled Rhyzobius, etc.

And then Rhyzobious lophanthe (Bristly Ladybird).  This one was brought in from Australia to control scale insects but has since become naturalised.

Other micro ladybirds I have seen before are Rhyzobius forestieri, also Australian and also from Mum's garden,

Rhyzobius litura, from my garden,

and Coccidula rufa, the Red Marsh Ladybird, usually found in waterside vegetation and damp grassland.  It lives by a pond in the golf course about 300m away from here.

There are plenty more to look out for, but not so many up in this part of the country.

An update from WeaselCam

After all the excitement of weasels on the trail cameras here in 2024 I had high hopes for this year but it has turned out to be fairly quiet.  Weasel populations are very responsive to prey availability and go up and down with variations in vole numbers.  I haven't had a camera on the weasel wall this year but the weasel box has been monitored continuously.  The camera records mostly common shrews and bank voles but there have been a few weasel visits in the last three months.

A handsome male appeared twice in April and May and I made a slow-motion video to show the changes in his moulting pattern over 16 days.

Last week this one turned up for a good look around.  I think it is new to the box.

And in June a high-speed weasel that was so fast I can't tell which it is.  There are no cuts in this edit.

I also saw a male weasel in the walled garden at the weekend so they are around.  I'll keep the camera going and report back if there is more activity.

Lunar Hornet Moth

The Lunar Hornet Moth (Sesia bembeciformis) is a day flyer and flies only in July.  Its unusual life cycle begins when the adults emerge from pupae in willow trees in early July.  The female attracts a mate by wafting a pheromone and after mating she lays her eggs on willow bark.  The larvae chew their way into the wood and stay there growing for two years before emerging and the cycle is then complete.

The Lunar Hornet Moth looks, sounds and flies like a hornet or giant wasp.  It is one of a group of clearwing moths that use Batesian mimicry to deter predators, that is they disguise themselves as something more dangerous and unpalatable to a potential predator.

Since 2020 a synthetic pheromone has been commercially available and reports of adult moths have increased dramatically.  This is the third year in a row I have had a go with a lure and all these photos are of males attracted to a pheromone lure in the past week.  (The female moth looks very similar but is larger.)  Once the moths have been in the trap for a few minutes they calm down and are happy to sit on a willow trunk for a few minutes while they gather their thoughts before flying off.

The photos on or in the trap aren't much good so I had a go at flight shots which are tricky but a few came out OK.  This one was taken in natural light and the shutter speed wasn't fast enough to freeze the wing movement.  

These were taken with flash.

For comparison here are a couple of European Hornets (Vespa crabro), also from Gosforth Nature Reserve but a few years ago.  They are brown rather than black but otherwise the moth's mimicry is pretty impressive.

Still good friends on OtterCam

I first read Tarka the Otter about 60 years ago.  When I re-read it last year I had forgotten how much it is to do with otter hounds and hunting (the book was published in 1927 and otter hunting in England wasn't banned until 1978).  The other surprising thing (to me) was how often Tarka met up with and socialised with other otters as I have read elsewhere that otters are solitary creatures, outside courtship and mating.  That fits with what I have seen on the trail cameras over the past few years but recently things have been different.  The resident female split from her cubs just about two months ago and immediately embarked on courting the local dog otter. She was encouraging him very noisily for three nights (courtship is said to last 3-5 days)  but they were still going around together 19 days later.  After that the cameras were recording only solo otters, until now.  Just one video in this post but, 53 days after courtship began, here they are again together.  First the dog, closely followed by the female.  She returned alone five minutes later.  It is difficult to judge from the video but if all goes well cubs should be born very soon.

May moths

I don't think I am cut out to be a moth trapper.  Not diligent or organised enough.  I set the trap on the last day of May, so a month ago, and it has taken me until now to sort out (some of) the results.  It was all a bit overwhelming with over 100 moths of dozens of species.  All I could do was to photograph them, or at least the ones that didn't fly off, and I did recognise some as I went through them.  Since then there has been so much else going on that I have only just got round to looking through the photos.  As ever, I found the medium-sized greyish-brown ones quite tricky but this time I got a lot of help from the Obsidentify app which appears to be very accurate and is certainly very confident.

There were several real beauties in the box and some I hadn't seen before so here are a few of the best.

First a Poplar Kitten, new to me.

Also Swallow Prominent,

Pebble Prominent,

Iron Prominent,

Gold Spot,

White Ermine,

Green Silver-lines,

Elephant Hawk-moth, there were two of these,

Poplar Hawk-moth, four of these,

Blood-vein, another two,

and Peppered Moth.

There were also four Orange Ladybirds, the ladybird most commonly attracted to light,

and a couple of ichneumons, probably Ophion sp.

After all that I shall set the trap again tonight and try to be a bit more organised.  Results to follow, I hope.