Some lucky streets have been chosen for a wildlife study which involves hosting a wildlife camera in your garden for 3 weeks, sometime between now and next March. Rachel Cates is working with the Zoological Society of London (ZSL) to investigate wildlife populations in the city. For her masters thesis, she is looking at the influence that gardens have upon mammals. The infrared camera will be activated by anything warm that walks in front of it.
She is targeting a range of streets at various distances from Alexandra Park, and if this does not provide enough responses, she will expand the selection. Currently the streets are: Alexandra Park Rd, Victoria Rd, Outram Rd, Princes Ave, Dukes Ave, Methuen Park, Donovan Ave, North view Ave, South View Ave, Hawthorn Rd and Beechwood Ave (these streets are being leafletted). For more information, email rachel.cates@wur.nl.
The hedgehog pic is from the London Wildlife Trust hedgehog survey .
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Yes, Annabel, mine - top one plus five others seen.
I have recently put a camera in my garden - no hedgehogs so far....
- looks like your garden is thorougly becatted!
Rachel Cates installed a camera in our garden a week ago and placed the camera in front of our compost heap. I'm so glad to be a part of this survey and really look forward to hearing whether anything interesting crops up (it would be so lovely to discover some animals other than cats and foxes).
That hedgehog friendly fencing looks ideal. You could get some holes made in your fence quite easily, I would think. In 2014 we had a pregnant hedgehog in our garden, and my son Eddie saw the baby hoglets. But we haven't had a hedgehog since. We've also had a newt and some baby frogs, but again that was 2 or 3 years ago.
Baby hoglets - that must have been amazing! Not sure what the neighbours would say to holes in the fences - !
We have lots of frogs too - and - can't believe I forgot - Hoards of squirrels.
Thankfully not a single rat came to investigate the sardines, although we have had problems with rats in the past, digging under the compost bins (our HotBin sorted that out) and cosying up to the rabbits in their large hutch (we successfully evicted them from there, and no longer have rabbits). No woodmice either – though Rachel said they would probably have been too small to see in the pictures. The odd pigeon, magpie and jay wandered past.
Rachel hasn’t found any hedgehogs in people’s gardens as yet (though the study continues until March) – maybe the garden fences around here are just too solid, without hedgehog-sized holes in their bases. One of her supervisors, Chris Carbone, lives in this area and has been studying hedgehogs in the Grove – he gave a talk about camera-trapping hedgehogs to the Friends of Alexandra Park not long ago (see under Previous Events in the Park). His usual subjects are larger and more exotic, and he showed us pictures of some of those too.
Last weekend Rachel came to collect the camera in our garden and ran through all the creatures that were seen. Alas no hedgehogs either, but Rachel explained that just because they weren't picked up by the camera doesn't mean they weren't there. Though having had a pregnant hedgehog in our garden three years ago, we've not seen any evidence of them since. And I'm pretty sure our fences are permeable. Back to Rachel's findings. We have regular fox visitors, a couple of over-confident squirrels and of course cats. The squirrels tried incredibly hard to dislodge the tin of sardines but didn't succeed. I counted about 5 different cats visiting our garden at staggered intervals - apparently cats come to some sort of arrangement and have their own 'time slots' for visiting gardens. We don't have a cat so the neighbourhood mogs work out their own shift pattern. Occasionally two came together. Anyone interested in animal behaviour/pet psychology will love looking through the footage.