Having spent many years monitoring wildlife in my Worcester garden using a trail camera, I was interested to try an adjusted trail camera to discover more of the world of the small mammal. As a member of Worcestershire Wildlife Trust and Worcestershire Mammal Group, I agreed with Jasmine, the site manager at Lower Smite Farm, that it would be interesting to see what happens in the undergrowth on the farm when we aren’t looking.

Over the course of a few weeks in autumn last year we retrieved lots of video footage giving an insight into the world of the small mammals. The footage was mostly of wood mice with quite a few bits of vole activity.

The wood mice only appeared during the hours of darkness, so the footage is in black and white. The significance of this is that it's possible that some of the mice were probably the less common yellow-necked mice but this sadly can't be confirmed. What we can tell is that there really were a lot of mice! I found it lovely to see the interaction of the mice and whilst it is impossible to determine the number of different individuals, from the obvious differences in sex and size of the mice, there were at least half a dozen most nights while food was available. To get the clearest pictures of the individuals, the camera is focused on the food pile and there were enough mice to nibble through 95% of the food over the course of one night - we only re-stocked the camera box weekly. The mice literally turned up as soon as it was dark and disappeared again before dawn. We did move the camera around in the hedgerows and mice always found it - one large male mouse with a raggy, pierced ear appeared at more than one site. He looked like he was ’in charge’ and was seen to scare other mice off the food.

In contrast, the voles we saw behaved very differently. It appeared as though they didn’t fancy any conflict with the mice and never approached the feeding area when there was any mouse activity. We also only ever saw one vole at a time. They certainly weren't nocturnal - they appeared during the day as well as at night when the mice weren’t around. The voles only appeared during the day when the camera trap was in a hedgerow close to open grassland, where I understand voles tend to have little runs through the undergrowth. On one occasion, a vole came and started caching food from the camera trap within an hour of us re-stocking the food - coincidence or was it watching?! It may also indicate that the vole(s) had figured out that they needed to get to the food quickly before the mouse nightshift started. I think most of the footage we got was of bank voles, which have a proportionally longer tail but I believe there is footage of a field vole with the shorter tail.

Based on these small mammal sightings, it is clear to see why the farm is so popular for owls and hawks. It is sad for the little critters when you have spent time watching them but it's all part of a healthy ecosystem.