Dusk

The half moon is rising



Foxes lope across darkening fields, betrayed only by their ice-white brush tips



Sub-adult deer tiptoe on cloven hooves out of the hedgerows...



...while their elders graze in the open, unaware or uncaring that they're sharing their meadow with a curious, travelling fox



Dawn

September sunrise



Autumn's hazy light is reflected by a million draping strands of spider silk



And old seed heads have been gifted tiaras of sparkling dew.



And up on the wires and bushtops, my big wildlife surprise of the weekend: a noisy, restless flock of tree (?) pipits, a species I've never recorded in my local area before.

I watched this small, finely-boned fox as he loped through the waving grasses as the sky pinkened with impending dusk. I've seen him before; he has a brush that is heavily banded with darker rings of brown, almost like a paler version of a wildcat's tail. He is not a nervous fox, and in any case seemed preoccupied by the wind. Gradually he loped closer and closer, slipping silently through the fence and out onto the verge - then realising, in an instant, just how close to me he had come. I took a couple of photos, and then he turned about and raced off through the meadow.


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Further down the road, two much larger shadows were tiptoeing towards me. A roe deer and her fawn! By this stage dusk had fairly closed upon the lane, and this photo is at the absolute limit of what is possible with my DSLR without a flash or tripod in the dark.



Isn't she beautiful!

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
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50. Wild boar - 500?
51. Feral goat - 315
52. Ferret - 200
53. Feral sheep - 150
54. Pine marten - <100