Harvest mice in Britain, new research

This video says about itself:

9 November 2014

Eurasian Harvest Mice, Micromys minutus, adults feeding and female with young in the nest. They are the smallest rodents in Europe, weighing an average of just 6 grams. The tail is semi prehensile and is used like a fifth limb when climbing.

Nature, wildlife and macro video library clips shot in the UK by specialist cameraman Steve Downer. Filmed on a JVC HD110 camera, HD 720p.

From Wildlife Extra:

A novel way is developed to sniff out how many harvest mice live in the UK

The tiny harvest mouse will stand up and be counted with the help of a sensitive nose

The People’s Trust for Endangered Species (PTES) has awarded an ecological grant towards an innovative project headed by PhD researcher Emily Howard-Williams at Moulton College in Northamptonshire.

Her team will train Tui, a flat-coated retriever, to learn to detect the scent of harvest mice, making tracking their presence in the countryside easier and more efficient.

The harvest mouse (Micromys minutus) is one of the most elusive and smallest of mammals in Great Britain and finding their tell-tale signs can be a difficult and time-consuming exercise even for the experts.

Consequently it has proved frustratingly difficult to determine an accurate picture of their current numbers in the UK, up to now.

Typically found in cereal fields, reed beds and hedgerows, harvest mice are believed to have declined in the past 40 years as a result of changes to farming practices and habitat management.

However, to date there have been no reliable studies to quantify this change, and it is unclear as to exactly how many are currently left in the UK.

With the help of Tui, who was bred from working gun dogs, Emily’s team hopes to shed some light on this most iconic species of the British countryside.

As Emily explains, “The harvest mouse appears to have undergone significant declines in parts of the countryside, partly in response to the intensification of modern agriculture, but also due to habitat loss.

“Yet it still remains difficult to ascertain just how many there really are. The funding from PTES will help to train our resident harvest mouse detector dog, enabling us to determine whether using sniffer dogs is the best approach in tracking these creatures!”

Harvest mice create nests, woven amongst tall grasses or reeds, giving skilled trackers key indicators of their presence.

However, these can be hard to find, even for the most expert eye, and nests as well as other indicators can be difficult to locate.

With the aid of a trained dog, Emily’s team will be able to survey a site more rapidly, with less margin for error.

A similar method is already being successfully used in New Zealand to seek out kiwi birds. Two English setters managed to sniff out 30 birds in just four days.

Nida Al-Fulaij, Grants Manager from PTES concludes, “We all know that dogs have an amazing sense of smell.

“The UK enlists the help of sniffer dogs at airports, music festivals and in the army, so why not also use them for conservation purposes to find harvest mice.

“The trained eye may miss a harvest mouse nest, but a trained nose is much more likely to pick up on a familiar scent and alert the handler to the presence of recent harvest mice activity in that area.

“We are very excited to be funding this project and look forward to seeing what results reveal about harvest mice populations in the UK.”