Zeltus

After far too long a break, I have found something I felt worth the effort of posting. One of the delights of owning property here in rural France is that we are surrounded with wildlife that back in the UK, is rarely, if ever seen. A young Hoopoe visits our garden most days for an evening meal, Buzzards abound, bats are all over the sky of an evening and even at the smaller scale of things, European stick insects and Praying Mantis’ are to be found if one looks carefully enough.

Of course, we also get less welcome visitors – particularly at harvest time, when mice are evicted from their field nests and come looking to us for a new home. Mostly field mice, rather more rarely, harvest mice and one memorable occasion, when a whole family of pygmy shrews moved in. In general, I use live traps when I can (that is, when we’re here) and simply move the critters I catch to the outskirts of the village and release them in a hedgerow. The incredibly aggressive but completely harmless pygmy shrews were very vocal in their disapproval of me evicting them but it’s that or the old-fashioned spring trap and rodent heaven as the alternative. I have resorted to killing traps on rare occasions – we have felt under siege once or twice and felt we needed to get rid of the uninvited guests asap. Fortunately, last night it was one of the live traps that did it’s job and this is what turned up in it.

I didn’t immediately recognise the beast – about the size of a gerbil and with a furry tail – well, that alone meant it wasn’t a mouse. I was rather confused as if the tail had been quite bushy, then I would have instantly have thought “Dormouse!” – but the Common Dormouse, Muscardinus avellanarius, is an attractive gingery brown colour and the Edible Dormouse, or (Glis glis) is a bit larger and more silvery-grey in colour. Whereas my specimen had a very attractive coat in grey, white and black. A quick look thru’ my books soon identified it as Eliomys quercinus, the Garden Dormouse, very common in the south of Europe and generally completely harmless. Not that commonly seen as they don’t often come into houses and they are nocturnal. The only problem that might occur is that they are communal creatures and tend to be quite noisy. So I’ve set a few more traps to see if we have more of them resident. I released this one as per normal but if we do have a glut, then I’m afraid the spring traps will be the next line of defence. Thankfully, it’s not a family of Glis glis – they can be a real nuisance, noisy, overly plentiful and quite happy to chew thru’ cables, wood pipes – anything really.

I’m afraid I had to steal this picture off’ve images.google.com. I didn’t see much value in trying to keep the animal until the next day simply to take a photograph of it. So I released it as soon as possible.

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