The pitter patter of tiny feet...
Cute fluffy ones, obviously
One of my favourite surveys to do are the ones involving footprint tunnels. I can’t decide if it’s the slightly Blue Peter* element to it, or if it’s the absolute joy of finding a sheet of paper covered in tiny footprints, but I love them so much.
The two main surveys we currently do using footprint tunnels are for hedgehogs, and for dormice.
So how does it work?
The concept is pretty simple - you need a tunnel for the animal to walk through, a base plate to fix the paper and tracking pads to, and a way of making ‘ink’ that won’t harm the animals if they eat it. Because obviously they will eat it.
Tell me more about the ‘ink’…
We use very finely ground activated charcoal mixed with olive oil. I’m sure any kind of vegetable oil would work, but olive oil’s what comes from the supplier, and I’ve never questioned why. That gets painted onto some masking tape, which is placed either end of the paper. Here’s some base plates for dormouse footprint tunnels all set up and ready to go.
Then what?
Well, then the base plate gets put in the tube, the whole lot gets put into a tree, and you wait….
How about the hedgehog ones?
Same deal, but the tube is bigger, triangular and you put two bits of paper with a gap in the middle and then some hotdog sausages in the space.
And this really finds animals does it?
It totally works. So amazingly well, that for dormice, if you follow the survey protocol, there’s a 95% chance of detecting them. Plus it reduces the survey time down to 3 months if you use 50 tunnels, when normally for dormice you have to spend a minimum of 6 months if you’re using 50 nesting tubes. Cool, right?
*For the non-Brits, Blue Peter is a children’s TV show where they routinely make things out of empty washing up liquid bottles, loo roll middles and sticky backed plastic. Possibly the most famous is the Tracy Island they made in the 90s.