We’ve only been driving for a few minutes and already our passenger – a wood mouse – is restless. We caught it in the cupboard under the stairs this morning, lured into a humane trap with peanut butter bait. Wood mice seem to find this irresistible, and five have succumbed to its aroma this year; we’re hoping this might be the last for a while. They don’t often find their way indoors, and we could release it back into the garden, but there’s always the possibility that this one could have developed a taste for home comforts and might find its way inside again. So we are on an errand of mercy, planning to release it into a hedgerow.
The garden wood mice live in log piles or in tunnels under old decaying tree roots. They are crepuscular foragers, and we don’t often see them during daylight hours in spring and summer – just occasional fleeting shadows, dashing for cover. In autumn, they have an insatiable appetite for caching a winter store of hazelnuts and, when those run out, raiding the bird-feeding table during the coldest, darkest months. They are part of the garden food web, and their large ears and prominent eyes are alert for tawny owls that sometimes perch in our neighbour’s hawthorn, swooping down when they emerge from their tunnels at twilight.
