Where the Wild Things Were

The Friends of Loftus Cemetery are a volunteer group who work to make the historic cemetery a pleasant and serene place in the local community.  They work to improve access and the appearance of the site with plantings and gardening and in recent years have given nature a hand with the provision of bird boxes.  Green open spaces can also be good locations for some of our smaller mammals.  With this in mind some of the Friends helped survey part of the old cemetery and some of the adjacent grassland using Longworth survey traps.  Traps were set out one evening with the help of Kenny our mammal expert, tripped a few nights later and then the following morning recovered to see what was present.

We were surprised to only recover bank voles from the survey traps in the Old Cemetery as we were expecting to find mainly wood mice.  In the  rough grass bank adjacent to the Cemetery extension we recovered a short tailed field vole and a rather feisty common shrew! All of the animals were released alive.

This short survey indicated that there are a number of small mammals in and around the Cemetery and more follow up surveys may follow.  Thank you to the Friends for their survey assistance.