I blog primarily about the wildlife that I photograph, and naturally enough I can only photograph the wildlife that I find But I don't see animals in proportion to their abundance. Many people conclude that a species is common because they see it often, when in reality it's just bolder or more daylight-active than its wild neighbours.

But who out there is always slipping under the blog radar? I've been number-crunching today and startled myself with the outcome I do not have data for the North Downs specifically, so I've had to work with the figures for the whole of England. *Population statistics for wild mammals - Tracking Mammals Partnership; weight data - mean values from Blitz's Mammal Field Guide; Livestock data from various professional online resources
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Overview

150,849,449 - England's estimated wild mammal population
72,806,719 kg - the approx. total weight of England's wild mammals (I'll explain why I worked this out in a moment!)

Bats
English species - 16
Population - 2,469,350
Proportion by number - 1.6%
Proportion by weight - 0.02%

I don't recommend handling bats because a) there are some health risks and b) they're protected, but these ones were being examined by an expert as part of a bat monitoring programme in Sussex This is a Bechstein's bat, one of Britain's rarest mammals:



And this, a brown long-eared bat.


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Carnivores
English species - 9
Population - 975,984
Proportion by number - 0.65%
Proportion by weight - 5.4%

Our carnivores command a disproportionate percentage of the total wildlife "weight" primarily because badgers are pretty stocky creatures, and they are relatively numerous. As we all know, badgers are much better at hiding themselves than foxes but I did at least see some tracks today


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Insectivores
English species - 5
Population - 52,850,000
Proportion by number - 35%
Proportion by weight - 4%

This is where things started to get rather interesting Even though they make up a tiny fraction of the total by weight, insectivores outnumber humans in England! Mostly, that's down to the extreme abundance of just two species - moles and common shrews. But moles are usually underground, and shrews are easily overlooked except when their hyper-fast metabolisms overwhelm them, and their tiny bodies are found on rural tracks.I've no photos of living insectivores, but I hope that most people know what a mole hill looks like, anyhow
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Rodents
English species - 12
Population - 69,173,500
Proportion by number - 45.8%
Proportion by weight - 6.2%

Most rodents in England are wood mice, bank voles and field voles (together, they outnumber grey squirrels by over 54 million). I've missed off a potential 13th species: the ship rat, which was driven to virtual extinction when its brown rat cousin arrived on these shores. For the record, whatever the press says, brown rats are only the eighth most common wild mammal in Britain, and vastly outnumbered by the seven species above them in the list.


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Ungulates
English species - 9
Population - 298,365
Proportion by number - 0.2%
Proportion by weight - 16.5%

Our native hoofed mammals have had a very chequered history; the wisent and tarpan are extinct, and the red deer is now hybridisating with introduced sika deer. Several other species have escaped from zoos, leaving us with a curiously international large mammal selection I have many photos of roe deer of course, but I thought it would be more interesting to post these pictures of dubious quality from my East Anglian days. This is a somewhat uncommon view of genuinely wild red deer in eastern England:



And this (believe it or not!) is a Reeve's muntjac, a Chinese species that has spread rapidly throughout the East Anglian peninsula after escaping from Woburn. It is hardly bigger than a border collie.


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Lagomorphs (Rabbits and Hares)
English species - 3
Population - 25,082,250
Proportion by number - 16.6%
Proportion by weight - 67.7%

...and by this point, I was so startled by the figures that I wondered for a moment if my spreadsheet was malfunctioning European rabbits come second to common shrews in the mammal population list, but they're so much larger than our other hyper-abundant species that they make up fully 63.9% of total mammal weight. Put that another way: for every 100 kg of mammal that is out there, almost 64 kg is rabbit!


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Livestock

Twenty-four million rabbits is certainly a lot...no matter how you count it! But I think it's worth noting that none of our wild mammals compare in biomass to the number of livestock in Britain. I've excluded their populations and weights from the above figures, because they'd just knock everything (...except rabbits) off the page.



- 10,000,000 cattle (3,998,000 tonnes)
- 30,000,000 sheep (3,720,000 tonnes)
- 5,000,000 pigs (450,000 tonnes - rather approximate because many are not adult)
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English wildlife highs and lows

1. Common shrew - 26,000,000
2. Rabbit - 24,500,000
3. Mole - 19,750,000
4. Wood mouse - 19,500,000
5. Bank vole - 17,750,000
//
21. Red fox - 195,000
//
50. Wild boar - 500?
51. Feral goat - 315
52. Ferret - 200
53. Feral sheep - 150
54. Pine marten - <100

Almost



Fortunately, the camcorder is coping better than my DSLR in the fog of grass. Here's some footage that I've taken on recent walks Firstly, a vixen "browsing" - shuffling back and forth across the meadow searching for food. I love her body language as she does this: head low, ears tightly back, concentration intense. I've also included some footage of a roe deer. At least, I thought I was filming only a deer. As you'll see, someone else gatecrashed the scene!



Elsewhere, the birds are active, even if often almost invisible in the treetops. This is, of course, a long-tailed tit:



Out on the golf course, a family of pied wagtails are feeding caterpillars to their fledglings.

For the last three days, the North Downs have been smothered in dense fog - the type of fog that blurs even the tops of nearby trees and makes you question the existence of the end of your own road This morning also began with little promise, but the sun has indeed broken through, and the local wildlife seems as keen to respond to the sudden brightness as humanity does.

I've actually spent most of the day in London, for reasons that will be apparent in my next post, but when I returned home to the sanity of the countryside this evening I was delighted to find four roe deer on show out in the meadows



Curiously, these bucks show different stages of antler growth. The one facing left in the picture below is still in velvet, while the other has already shed this growth of soft skin and fur. Roe deer rut very early in the year - July and August - but even so, it is somewhat surprising to me.



Also in the group was a small yearling doe.



Two of the herd eventually made their way into the copse and out into the adjoining field, seeming to change colour as they caught the sunshine





And a little sunshine never displeases a fox, either



Just a couple of birds to finish - a robin investigating a nest box...



...and a male blackbird showing his colour against a backdrop of new spring leaves.