While we’re on the subject of foxes…
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Fox
Did you hear the foxes last night? January is the middle of their mating season when they are a lot noisier than at other times of year.
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Winter badgers
Badgers don’t hibernate, even in January, but they sleep a lot. The dominant female is pregnant, awaiting the birth of two or three cubs in February, and the rest of the clan are living off their fat reserves. They will leave the sett to visit the latrines but in particularly bad weather will dig latrines in distant and otherwise unused tunnels inside the sett.
Like the rest of us, they are waiting for the spring.
Wood mouse
The wood mouse is Britain’s commonest and most widespread species of rodent. There must be hundreds, if not thousands, in our nature reserve but they are rarely seen. Here are some of their personal details.
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Badger Timetable
What are our badgers doing in the middle of this damp and overcast November?
Continue readingTen water vole facts
Here are some fascinating facts about water voles:
Continue reading “Ten water vole facts”Who lives here?
Sarah found a nest, just above ground level, among the blackthorn, close to all the hazel that runs downhill alongside the hedge between Kestrel Field and Cornfield. Does anybody know what makes a nest like this?
Continue reading “Who lives here?”The brown rat
The brown rat (Rattus norvegicus) is an incredibly adaptable animal; it can be found almost anywhere in the UK, including our nature reserve. All it needs is shelter and food.
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The nature reserve’s rabbits are beginning their long and busy breeding season.
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January is mid-mating season for foxes.
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Here’s an interesting thing:
among mammals, otters have the thickest fur. In every square inch of a Eurasian otter’s skin, there are around half a million hairs. For comparison: the average dog has 15,000 hairs per square inch and the average human, only 1,000.
Field Vole
Though you may not have seen them, there are field voles all over the park. Here ten things you may not have known about them.
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Mole
The picture is a cheat, taken from the internet’s public domain. We haven’t seen a mole in the park, only lots of recent molehills in The Arboretum.
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Message from Jude Summers
“I have photos of badgers eating below my bird feeding station which is on the edge of Southwick Country Park, by Lambrok stream. I thought people may like to see them. They’re not great quality but still nice. Cheers.“
Thanks Jude; brilliant picture!
Badger
There is a badger sett in the park, hidden away in the boundary hedges.
Continue reading “Badger”Burrowers: water voles
The third, and last, of the short videos about the mammals that live underneath the park’s green fields:
The park’s grass eaters
Grass is very hard to digest and most of the animals that eat it have evolved complicated digestive systems to deal with it.
Continue readingA fascinating fact about foxes
Foxes have scent glands on their feet to mark well-used trails so they can follow them easily at night.
Picture by Peter Trimming (CC BY 2.0) commons.wikimedia.org
Fox
January is mid-mating season for foxes.
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There are rabbits in the park.
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Fox
Vulpes vulpes, Britain’s only species of fox; in fact Britain’s only native member of the Canidae family.
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Some of the larger mammals on our species list are just passing through.
Ten water vole facts
Here are some fascinating facts about water voles:
Continue reading “Ten water vole facts”Bat numbers
Ten numerical facts about bats:
Continue reading “Bat numbers”Pygmy shrew
The smallest mammal in the world is the bumblebee bat but the Eurasian pygmy shrew (Sorex minutus), a park resident, comes a close second.
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Southwick Country Park Nature Reserve 