Wild Hares and Hummingbirds by Stephen Moss

neighbours, whose haunting cries pierce the cool morning air, lending an oddly exotic ambience to this very English scene.
    Half an hour after the chorus begins, it accelerates, both in variety and volume. Other resident species – dunnock, wren and song thrush – start up, swiftly followed by great tits and blue tits. The first migrant to sing is, appropriately, the earliest to arrive, the chiffchaff; soon followed by the sweeter tones of the blackcap. Half an hour after sunrise, almost all the local birds have joined in, creating a wall of sound from which it can often be difficult to pick out individual species, let alone a particular songster. Finally, the finches bring up the rear, along with the distant, laughing call of a green woodpecker.
    At this stage I stop bothering to try to identify every bird, and instead am content to let the chorus flow over me, like a wave surging up a beach. Hearing the whole orchestra in full flow, it is easy to forget the true purpose of this springtime phenomenon. The birds are neither trying to entertain us, nor to compete with the other species singing around them. Instead they are singing for two very specific biological reasons: to attract a mate, and to repel rival males, of the same species. So although we hear up to twenty different songs, the birds only listen to their own kind, in a kind of avian audio apartheid.
    As I stand and listen, though, I can’t help but ignore this, and simply revel in the privilege of being able to witness one of the greatest natural wonders in the world. What is so extraordinary is that it takes place all over Britain, from the most far-flung islands to the heart of our cities. And yet by the time we 60 million Britons have stirred from our beds, the show’s over.

    D URING THIS SEASON , and indeed at most other times of year, the vast majority of our encounters with wildlife are with birds. And yet there are probably as many mammals as birds in the British countryside. But because so many of them are nocturnal, or simply very good at keeping hidden, we hardly ever see them. When we do, the meeting between us is often so brief that we rarely get any real sense of their lives.
    Take the field vole. This is not simply the commonest mammal in Britain; it is also, with upwards of 75 million individuals, the only one to outnumber the human population of these islands.
    To have a chance of finding a field vole at all, we need to resort to the rather underhand method of catching them. Fortunately Alison, a stalwart of the Mammal Society, lives along the Yarrow Road less than a fifteen-minute walk from my home. She has kindly agreed to bring along her collection of traps, hopefully to reveal the secrets of those mysterious creatures known as ‘small mammals’, including mice and shrews as well as voles.
    One fine April evening Alison and her nine-year-old twins Lewis and Harriet pay us a visit, to set the traps. The mechanism is wonderfully simple: once the creature has run along the narrow tunnel, lured by the presence of seeds (for voles and mice) and blowfly larvae (for the insectivorous shrews), a trap door shuts behind it, so it cannot escape. Inside, it is more like a hotel than a cage: packed with straw for them to keep warm, and plenty of food, as these tiny creatures must eat almost constantly, devouring their body weight every single day, or they will die.
    We spend an entertaining half-hour placing the traps in suitable locations where a small mammal might stumble across them, gaining scratched hands from the many brambles around the edges of our garden in the process. Alison warns us that we might return the next day to find all seventeen traps empty – the process is very hit and miss. But for me, that’s all part of the fun.
    Bright and early the following morning we are up, dressed and ready for our mammal encounters. The children are suitably excited, and I worry about how soon they might get bored if we have no luck. But of the first