NATURE A wood mouse finds a new (temporary) home

HEAT SEEKER Inquisitive wood mice can come into homes searching for warmth in the winter. 

The whiskered ginger visitor


Country sights and sounds
John Shelley

We have a visitor, a little guest, come to share our house. Tired of working for a living, this individual thinks he has hit upon the good life. Little does he know that his days here are numbered.
He is a wood mouse, and a lively little fellow with a chirpy, inquisitive nature. If only he had better toilet habits, then I should be quite content to let him live for the winter.
Now, it should immediately be impressed that he is not like his cousin, the house mouse, who leaves a dirty trail of little crumbs everywhere he goes. The house mouse is most unwelcome. He smells, for one thing, while my new friend Woody does not.
Still, he has to go somewhere, and wherever it is that he performs his ablutions it has to stop. While we think it fun to watch him scurry from his place of concealment, our guests do not. Mice of whatever variety, we are told, belong firmly in the outside world. And so they do.
I wonder how Woody found his way inside? Through the door, I suppose, for it is often left ajar. Perhaps he followed his nose and, entranced by the scent of baking, entered our strangely alien world before he knew what was happening. And what does he eat? There must be morsels enough to sustain him. He looks well enough, with his sleek, gingery coat and dapper white neckerchief, and he is lively, even acrobatic, springing over the iron fender like a little Olympian.
I think he has soon come to trust us, for he sits on his haunches and stares from oversized liquid globes of eyes, the only movement that whiskered nose so full of questions. He sits and sits, then off he goes, a miniature racehorse taking delight in the sprint to the post. He might think he is safe, but we are already plotting his downfall.
A humane trap is already in place in one corner of the room, but Woody steadfastly refuses to go near it. If only he would oblige, then he would escape with his life, back to the trees across the road where he came from. The next option is the spring trap. We are reluctant to use that, for even though his life is a little one it is still a life and he is a harmless little beast with more enemies than he knows how to hide from.
My main concern is that Woody might turn out to be a female, and a pregnant one at that. If that should be the case she might give us ten or a dozen babies, each of which would be capable of producing their own offspring within eight weeks of birth. By the end of the winter we should be overrun with them. No, Woody must go.
At 10.30pm we were walking under moonlight and met up with our barn owl. It appeared huge and ghostly in the near-dark as it hunted along the roadside for members of Woody’s extended family. The owl seemed to be almost as interested in us as we were in it, circling overhead several times before going back the way it had come. When I sucked through my fingers to produce a squeaking sound it came back again, whirled above us and floated away and out of sight.
We are seeing more of our owls than ever. I think that the pair that nested in the old house enjoyed a good summer and produced a healthy family. There must be plenty of mice for them. The nearby woodland has been felled, cleared and replanted in recent years, and the newly emerging forest is just entering its most productive stage in terms of biodiversity.
New shrubs are starting to produce fruits, brambles are full of blackberries and invertebrates are thriving. This abundance of food supports a wonderful array of birdlife and along and through the undergrowth creep armies of wood mice and other rodents. This productive stage will endure until the new trees rise above the tangle of lesser plants and start to close out the light of the sun.
There are ten or a dozen years to go before that happens. Until then we shall likely find more and more mice looking for somewhere warm to spend the winter. Hopefully we shall see more owls as well, to help keep their numbers in check.