Mystery Mammal part 1, and the Tale of a Tail

Back in my New Years' roundup post, I wrote: 'With the help of a friend, I added to these records two mammal records for my area which were both unexpected and exciting, because they were species I didn’t know were about.  I hope to write about both of them soon!' This post is going to be about the first one.


Last June, I got up one Sunday ready to go to my local patch for my weekly BTO Birdtrack survey, turned on my phone and found a text from a friend of mine. He'd been cycling back from the station late the night before, and had found what he described as a baby deer, dead on the road, and recently judging by the good condition. Being a lot less squeamish than I am, and a cool guy who likes to share stuff (we both find examining dead animals very interesting for naturalist reasons), he picked the deer up and transported it to the entrance of my local patch which was a little way along the road, and left it there under the trees at the entrance. He then sent me a text with the location, and urged me to go and look at it as soon as possible- as I've mentioned, my patch is a very popular dog walking spot, and this was a sunny Sunday, which meant there'd be dogs out in force, dogs who would no doubt be very interested in a dead deer. So I hurried there as quickly as possible, armed with my camera and sketchbook.


Upon arrival, I searched fruitlessly for a while before finding the poor thing. It was indeed small for a deer, and sort of odd-looking to my inexperienced eyes (inexperienced at deer, anyway!). I'd seen Roe Deer before at the patch and thought of them as the only deer in the area, but this deer was definitely too small. As my friend had called it a baby deer I was still working on the assumption that this was what it was, so I decided to look it up when I got home and started taking photos.


I won't be using many of the photos I took in this post because looking back at them, honestly the poor deer looks terrible. It didn't smell at all-I think it quite likely died the night my friend found it-and at the time I thought dogs hadn't damaged it that much, but looking at the photos now I think I was wrong. The deer presumably died after being hit by a car but it's hard to tell which of its injuries were caused by the car and which were the dogs. One of its back legs was badly broken, which probably was the car, but its tail had been torn right off and was missing, which was no doubt a dog, and the unbroken back leg had been quite obviously chewed. There were also bloody marks on its muzzle, around the eye and on its head, which could have been a corvid, possibly the Magpie that was sitting in a tree above eying the deer while I was there. The fur on the deer was also thin with small bald patches, which I suppose could have been from poor health before it died, but I suspect dogs worrying the corpse as more likely.


But enough morbid talk! I may not be using my photos, but I did do this sketch:

It was lying on leaf litter and one of the ears was buried, which is why I haven't drawn all of it

Most of the deer I've seen in the wild are Roe Deer, and they are the most common where I live. I've seen Fallow Deer a few times in the New Forest, but all my other observations of (wild, non-park) deer have been of Roes. Going by my assumption that this deer would be a Roe Deer, hopefully you can see from my sketch of what its head looked like why I would say it looked odd. Firstly, its head is wide but tapers sharply down to a thin, pointy nose. The inside of its ear has very little hair on it, with only a tuft where it joins the head and the rest bare, pink-grey, slightly wrinkled skin. The top of the head has odd ridges on it, running down the nose. And next to the eye is a strange, curved hole in the skin. At the time I assumed this was more damage to the body.


I texted my friend to say I'd found the deer, and he texted back saying 'I think it's a Muntjac'. At the time I thought 'Nah!' because I was so convinced Roe Deer were the only species in the area. By the time I got home and had a chance to google Muntjac Deer, my friend was starting to doubt that it was one. However once I saw the results of my google search, I was absolutely positive it was! Because I saw...this:

By Nilfanion (Own work) [CC-BY-SA-3.0 (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0)], via Wikimedia Commons

Well, not exactly this one, this is a stock image of a Muntjac, but it does the trick. It really helped that I had spent so much time carefully studying the ridges on the head and the texture of the inner ears while sketching, because when I looked at the photos, those were the features that jumped out at me and made me certain. Here's a Roe Deer for comparison:

By Malene Thyssen (User Malene) [GFDL (http://www.gnu.org/copyleft/fdl.html), CC-BY-SA-3.0 (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/) or CC-BY-SA-2.5 (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/2.5)], via Wikimedia Commons

You can see the Roe's ears are much hairier, its muzzle less pointy, and it lacks the distinctive head ridges the Muntjac has. Incidentally the Muntjac in the stock picture is a buck with antlers and you can see they grow out of the ends of the ridges, making the antlers seem to lie along the head rather than grow out of the top like the antlers of the native British deer species. The Muntjac I sketched didn't have antlers but both sexes have the ridges, and it was mostly their distinctiveness that made me sure it was a Muntjac. In the pictures you can also see the Muntjac is shorter-legged, shorter necked and stockier, and its fur is a yellow-brown shade while the Roe is more reddish-brown. And regarding the hole below the eye of the Muntjac that I thought was damage to the corpse- the stock picture doesn't really get close enough but you can just see little marks below the eyes. According to the British Deer Society those are actually sub-orbital glands, which are very large on Muntjac Deer.


Until my friend found the dead Muntjac, I had no idea there were Muntjac in Hampshire at all, especially not in my area! I knew very little about them, and I still don't know much, other than what they look like and that unlike other deer they tend to be solitary. Road kill is always sad to see, but there are often times when it can tell you a lot about an animal, and as I've mentioned in previous posts the National Mammal Atlas accepts records of all signs of mammals, so submitted findings of road kill can help build a more complete picture of the distribution of these mammals, and finding and identifying dead mammals that you'd have little chance of seeing alive in the wild is a great way of building your own knowledge of the wildlife in your local area. When I post Mystery Mammals part 2, I'll show another example of the discovery of a dead mammal I didn't have any idea was in the area that was found as road kill. By the way, if you're an artist interested in animal anatomy like myself, I highly recommend sketching dead animals from life, if you have the time and it's safe to do so (obviously if the mammal is in the middle of a road and it isn't possible or hygienic to move it, then maybe photos only!). Drawing the Muntjac from life when I didn't know what species it was helped me pick up on the details that would later allow me to identify it without doubt, and I got a sketch that I'm very happy with and which is much better observed than if I'd copied one of the photos I took instead.

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The sketch isn't the only thing I have relating to this deer. When I finished sketching and photographing, I was walking out of the area of woodland when I noticed a patch of fur under a tree. It was clearly the deer's fur, and nearby I found a much larger scrap that I realised was the deer's entire tail that had been torn off by a dog. On a whim, and thanks to a plastic sandwich bag I'd brought in case I found any feathers, I picked it up, wrapped it in the bag and took it home. My friend (a different friend) knew a bit about preservation techniques for pelts, and I thought I'd show it to her and see if she could teach me how to preserve it.


Mindful of decomposition, I asked her as soon as possible and she recommended I cure it with salt. Looking for a little more information, I discovered this tutorial about salt cure taxidermy. It recommends iodized salt, which I found without too much difficulty in a medium sized supermarket. Before starting I examined the tail and found it had come off relatively cleanly, and though I could feel a firm line along the middle where the end of the spine would go, there was no bone left in it at all- it must have remained on the carcass when the tail came off. The firmness was just the edges of the hole the spine had been in pressing together.


As the tutorial describes, I covered the bottom of a small box with a layer of salt. Then I sprinkled salt over the place where the tail had come off the body, as this is the area that needs the moisture drawn out of it the most, and then placed the tail in the box. Then I covered it up with salt and left it for 8 weeks. (The tutorial says 6-8 weeks depending on size but I went with the longest option to be safe!)


Here it is!

Look at the gorgeous colour in that fur. :) As you can see from the bottom photo, everything dried out just fine and though there was never much flesh on it, what there was is now preserved.

The Muntjac tail is now part of my not-very-big collection of things that aren't feathers. I have a few small bones, which I will write about one day, and a Roe Deer antler (bought not found, sadly), and now my first tail, of an animal I've never seen alive. I doubt I will make collecting tails from road kill into a habit but it's an interesting part of my naturalistic collection. I sometimes read blogs of people who skin animals and preserve the pelt, or stuff roadkill, but I'm not interested in doing any of these things myself, nor am I interested in making jewellery out of (legally collected) preserved animal tails, which the tutorial I used seems to have been made for the purpose of. It's interesting to read about these things, though! That reminds me, I really must start a blogroll in a sidebar on this blog showing blogs I read and admire.

Happy New Year!

Happy 2014 to all!  I hope you are all enjoying the new year. :)

It’s been a while since I last posted (mostly because of my extremely hectic Christmas job) and I’ll hopefully be catching up on my backlog of post ideas soon, but I wanted to look back over the last year for my first post of 2014.

To start off with, here are some of my ‘first and lasts’ for the year!  (I normally only do this with Swallows, House Martins, Swifts and winter thrushes, as other migratory species I don’t see quite as often, but I’ve added any other records I happened to make this year.)

• 14/4- first Swallow (Barton Farm)
• 19/4- first Whitethroat (garden)
• 28/4- first House Martin and Swift (Barton Farm) 

• 14/9- last Sand Martins (Itchen in Winchester) (note: I don’t see Sand Martins as often as Swallows or House Martins, so they were probably around much later than this!)
• 21/9- last Reed Warbler (Hook with Warsash)
• 3/10- last Swallows and House Martins (Barton Farm)
• 25/8- last Swift (Washington WWT)- This is a particularly interesting record, as it seems unusually late for a Swift, and for it to be so far north (Washington is near Newcastle).  I was watching a flock of House Martins and Swallows when I spotted the unexpected Swift among them!  Very surprising.  My last Swift record of 2012 was in early August in the south! 

• 6/11- first Redwings of autumn (Barton Farm)
• 21/11- first Fieldfares of autumn (Barton Farm)

I saw 141 species of bird this year, which is down on last year (148), but that's ok.
This year I added 3 new species to my British list, all being species I have wanted to see for soooo long- Goshawk, which I wrote about here, and Great Grey Shrike and Red-crested Pochard, which I wrote about here, including my reasons for wanting to see a Red-crested Pochard so much (it’s more complicated than Goshawk and Great Grey Shrike, my reasons for them are both ‘this bird is clearly awesome!!)

I saw several interesting new species in my garden, most notably 4 Yellowhammers that came to feed under the feeders in February.  A Nuthatch was another great addition to the garden list, and a female Whitethroat that took cover in the garden for a while.

I saw 9 new species at my local patch, including Red Kite, Peregrine, Hobby, Lapwing and Firecrest! It was an exciting year for my little patch (1km square of arable farmland, which I will write about in a future post).

I also found the feather of a Barn Owl in my patch, which while Barn Owl won’t be on my list unless I see one, proves that a Barn Owl was present!  This was an unexpected and fantastic record.

Completed my first year of patch watching.

A pair of Peregrines nested in my town, as far as I know for the very first time.  To make it even more exciting, one (possibly two) of their fledged young visited my patch! That’s a post to get around to writing next year.

Breeding species observed at my patch (i.e. I saw recently fledged young or suspected a nest site) included Blackbird, Robin, Wren, Whitethroat, Yellowhammer, Magpie and Carrion Crow.

I began a new interest in identifying and recording fungi.  I think it’s been a good autumn for them!

It was a great year for Clouded Yellow butterflies, and I saw many individuals, including two records at my patch.

I was able to return to Kent this year and visit the places I used to go to see wildlife when I lived there while at uni (moved back to Hampshire a year and a half ago).  I went back to Elmley Marshes and saw the nest box of Barn Owls they had this year (this was early November and the young were fully grown and feathered but seemed to be still using the box as a daytime roosting site, though they were awake and looking out when I saw them!), and enjoyed watching the abundant Marsh Harriers again- they are one of my favourite birds but are scarce in Hampshire.  I also visited my old patch Ferry Marshes, a walk along the Swale estuary where you never know what you might see- this time it was a Grey Seal swimming up the Swale!

I went on my very first twitch! (I’ve been meaning to write about this for ages, but for now I’ll just say that I didn’t see the bird, and probably won’t go on any more twitches. XD)

My knowledge of bird songs and calls has got much better this year, and I’ve been able to add to my experience by hearing some birds songs I’d never heard before, such as Redstart, Wood Warbler, Firecrest and Grey Wagtail.  I always find hearing a bird sing and then identifying it by seeing it is the best way to make sure you won’t forget that song, much better than listening to a recording.  (Though recordings are very useful for confirming things, I use them for that all the time!)

I began making records of every mammal I saw, found dead or saw signs of for the National Mammal Atlas, and it was absolutely fascinating.  It made me realise that I don’t actually see mammals all that often (though this of course depends on where you live- staying at my Uncle’s in London over Christmas, I saw squirrels in the garden every day, and a fox, and was also awoken by the incredibly eerie screams of a fox early on Christmas morning!)  With the help of a friend, I added to these records two mammal records for my area which were both unexpected and exciting, because they were species I didn’t know were about.  I hope to write about both of them soon!

I did more sketching of wildlife and wildlife behaviour (and posted some of them: here are my Herring Gull colony sketches and my Sparrowhawk kill sketches) and I hope I will be able to sketch more, and therefore observe and learn more, in the new year.  I studied illustration, and if I can incorporate those skills with the wildlife knowledge I have been building since I was a child, maybe I can one day become a professional wildlife artist, or at the very least develop a fulfilling and worthwhile hobby!

I was able to visit Germany and learn a little about the wildlife there.

My efforts to improve my seawatching continued this year, and while I’ve had limited success so far I hope to improve my knowledge of this tricky subject in the coming year.

I saw a Cetti’s Warbler sing out in the open!  This happened back in January and yet it remains one of the most notable records of the year in my mind.  As a bird that can be inches away from you when it sings while remaining so well hidden in cover you can’t even glimpse it, it was extraordinary to see this one so well.  I was looking at a small, brown bird perched in a leafless tree, and trying to place what it was, when it opened its beak and out burst the forceful and unmistakable song of the Cetti’s Warbler!  It remains the best view of a Cetti’s I’ve ever had.

And...I started keeping this blog!  It’s been very enjoyable, and I want to thank you all for reading and especially to those who commented and who emailed me with information and feedback, it means so much to me.  I hope to be able to start writing on a regular schedule in the New Year, with perhaps a day for posting, or posts coming out every two weeks or even every week!  I do have a lot of upcoming post ideas.


So that's my wildlife recap of 2013! I'd love to hear about your years too: what wildlife did you see for the first time this year? Did you record any species unusually early or late? What did you see a lot of/not much of? What new things did you learn this year? Tell me all about it. :)

I hope you all have a happy new year, and happy wildlife watching!

Recording signs of mammals for the National Mammal Atlas

Note: This post contains photos of dead animals and poo. Just a heads up in case you're eating your dinner!

At the start of this month I was in Wales, and when I came back I was determined to write about the wildlife...but I have epic writer's block on that post. So to try and shift it, here's a post about looking for mammals!

Recently I became aware of the National Mammal Atlas, a project by the Mammal Society to try and map the distribution of every British mammal species, and being someone who loves recording records online (I already submit to Birdtrack, BTO's garden bird count, goingbirding.co.uk, and seasonal counts such as the Big Garden Birdwatch and the Big Butterfly Count) I was very interested in the project. They want every single record, from rare species to common ones like Rabbit, Brown Rat and Grey Squirrel. As well as reports of living mammals they accept reports of dead animals, meaning roadkill can be a useful record, and they want records of signs of mammals, such as burrows, droppings, footprints or mole hills. As a birdwatcher I sometimes see mammals, but if I'm lucky I might see two species in one trip. So I decided to go on a walk and see how many signs of animals I could find.

Since the weather has been gorgeous recently I decided to go to a good place for butterflies, Stockbridge Down, and sure enough the place was alive with them: Meadow Brown, Gatekeeper, the lovely Marbled White, the tiny Small Heath and the cute, bright orange Small Skipper. Best of all was the large, lurid orange fast-flying Dark Green Fritillary. The Down is also fantastic for birds, and though it's getting to a quiet time of year for songbirds there was still plenty to see, including a male Blackcap popping in and out a tree with beakfuls of food, a blindingly yellow male Yellowhammer singing from the top of a bush, and a flock of 5 or 6 Mistle Thrushes (maybe a family?) flying by.

But what about the mammals? By the time I arrived at the Down I unfortunately already had records for two species from the drive over. I say unfortunately because of course they were roadkill: a Grey Squirrel about halfway through the journey, and rather heartbreakingly, a Badger, very close to the entrance to the Down. I've never seen a living Badger before (though I have found signs of them) and I hate seeing them dead on the roads. Then I had barely stepped through the gate of the nature reserve before I found a third mammal, a Common Shrew. This is another animal I've never seen alive, despite it being incredibly common in Britain; I expect it's probably nocturnal like a lot of small rodents. This, of course, is why records of dead animals are useful to the Mammal Society- otherwise they'd end up with far more comprehensive records for diurnal animals than nocturnal animals. Anyway, here's a picture of the Shrew.

 

Poor little thing. Ask anyone: I have a soft spot for small furry creatures. ^^ You can tell this is a shrew by its very pointy nose (unlike the rounded nose of a vole) and its hairy tail (unlike the bald tail of a mouse) that is short compared with the body. Finally, the teeth of a shrew are tipped with red, as you can see in this close-up:

I would love to find out why the teeth are red, so if anyone knows, let me know. 

As for how I know this is a Common Shrew and not one of the other kinds, I confess it was mostly process of elimination: the Common Shrew is far more numerous and therefore it is most likely to be one. The fur colour (warm brown rather than dark grey) and size (about the size of a mouse rather than smaller) also helped me come to this conclusion. 

How it died is a bit of a mystery to me, as being killed by a predator would seem the most likely cause of death, but why would the predator then leave its kill? But then on the Mammal Society information page on Common Shrews, I found this: 'They are often found abandoned by the predator..since a liquid produced from glands on the skin is foul tasting.' So that seemed plausible. And in the first photo you can see what looks like it might be the fatal wound, on the back of the Shrew's neck, which is where a predator would bite to kill its prey.

As I continued my walk, I found mole hills, and burrows covered with rabbit droppings, as well as the only living mammal I saw on my walk: a lone, alert-looking rabbit! Rabbit droppings are easy to identify, but later on I found some poo that caused a bit more confusion.

 

As you can hopefully see in the close-up, these droppings are packed with beetle shells, which made me think 'Badger!' straight away. The reason for that is I remember when I was a Wildlife Explore (young RSPB member) we found some poo like that on a field trip, and the leaders said it was Badger poo. I did a little research all the same, and then began to be unsure, because I found out that Badgers make latrines near their setts and that's where most of their dung will go. This was found out on the grass, not in a latrine and nowhere near a sett, so I started to look for suggestions for alternative possibilities online. It seems that beetle shells can be found in Hedgehog dung, but to rule that one out size is the main factor, and though I didn't measure the droppings (must bring a ruler next time!) compared with the size of a Hedgehog, I think they were far too big. Domestic dog can be ruled out immediately because the poo didn't smell, and dogs don't tend to eat loads of beetles. Same with sheep, which do graze on part of the Down, but they certainly don't eat beetles. Fox poo can also be ruled out because that has a peppery, pungent smell (I've had the dubious pleasure of finding Fox poo before) which this didn't have at all.

So for a while I was unsure about what I had found here, until I noticed something else which you should be able to see in the close-up: there's some long, white hairs stuck to the droppings! I'm almost sure they are Badger hairs, and I already know Badgers are in the area (thanks to my sad find near the entrance of the reserve earlier) so I've reported this to the Mammal Atlas as a field sign of Badgers. Just in case, though, I've attached a photo so the record can be checked. I did the same for the Common Shrew, though not for the mole hills or dead squirrel, those are pretty easy even for a mammal novice such as myself. ^^

The best thing about trying this experiment out was realising how much I might normally miss: if I wasn't thinking about looking for mammals, I might not even have noticed the shrew or the Badger droppings, or the mole hills, which even though they are a common sight, are a sure sign that an animal barely anyone ever sees is present in the area! So, although I only saw that one Rabbit, I also found Badger, Mole and Common Shrew, as well as that squirrel on the journey, and therefore had 5 species to submit to the Atlas. And I learned some new things about Common Shrew and Badgers!

To anyone who wants to submit your own results, follow this link: http://www.mammal.org.uk/ and go to 'submit records' on the left. You can submit any mammals you have seen in Britain since 2000, as long as you know the date and the location you saw it, which you pinpoint on a map. When doing this, it helped me to remember whereabouts the animal was found in relation to a landmark: for example, the dead squirrel was on the road near the entrance to Sparsholt College, so that made it easier to find on the map. At some point I want to go back and submit some mammals I've seen in the past.

Hopefully Wales post will be up next! Because I really did see some awesome things there...