The Giant Rat of Rusper (PART 2)

 

Five months ago I wrote my last blog. In it I shared the news that I had recently purchased a 12 acre woodland in deepest darkest East Sussex. I mentioned that a strange ‘giant rat’ had been spotted lurking outside one of the abandoned badger setts. I closed the blog with a promise that I would keep investigating until I found out what it was…

 

As it happens, just 24 hours after my blog was posted I downloaded 4 truly glorious seconds of video footage from the camera I had positioned directly outside the badger sett entrance. As seen here, I had captured my ‘strange creature’ waddling into the badger sett. Unfortunately it was just its back-end, but it was enough to confirm that our strange beast was not a badger (tail too long), nor a rat. It was clearly a mustelid of some sort, but which? I shared the video with all the ecology experts in my black book. Eventually it was narrowed down to being either an American Mink - not native to the UK, can cause lots of damage, would probably need to be trapped and destroyed - or a Polecat  - native to UK, can cause lots of damage, should be encouraged and nurtured. (Read into that what you will). The only way we could tell for certain was to get a face-shot since Polecats have ‘bandit-type’ markings whereas American Mink don’t.

 

About the only hard fact we could determine was that it was a male (watch the video, its very obvious…).

 

I felt that whilst the above news was quite exciting, it was not blog-noteworthy. The mystery needed resolving. From that day to this the entrance to the badger sett has been closely monitored. In my desire to capture a shot of the elusive animal I even briefly broke my (self-imposed) rule of not using bait. This resulted in me capturing an almost perfect shot of a very happy squirrel eating peanut butter from the end of a stick.  

 

Last Friday I finally decided it was time to abandon my search and finally move my camera to another part of the woodland (we have 4 positioned in various positions across the site). I removed the SD card and late that evening as I sat in bed watching the 58 videos which had been captured over the previous few days. As usual, most were of the squirrels, rabbits and deer which seem to live happily in the woodland. However clips 56 and 57 were of a beautiful stoat, surely the fastest moving animal in the UK!  

 

Imagine my excitement however when, having worked my way through my badger sett SD card, I moved onto the memory cards from the other cameras. Suddenly I was looking at a 10 second video of a mature majestic Buzzard, with half a bloodied pigeon in its gruesome talon, positioned perfectly in front of my camera. It was a shot professional nature photographers would sell their grandmothers to achieve. The video of both the stoat and the buzzard are here.

 

In this file you will also see some of the other creatures we have observed, including bats (if anyone ever invites you to attend a bat survey SAY YES IMMEDIATELY; it is the best fun ever!), a slow worm, foxes, badgers (my favourite animal), mice and owls. The owls are particularly difficult to record. I swear they work out where the cameras are and then deliberately sit with their backs to them.

 

My dream is to record an owl hunting and capturing one of the mice. When I get that shot I will write my next blog, irrespective of whether we have identified the mysterious ‘rat’ by then!

No 189: The Giant Rat of Rusper

I have fallen in love.

The object of my desire is a 12 acre woodland, 3 miles west of Gatwick, just outside the picturesque West Sussex village of Rusper.

She is beautiful. I saw her on January 1^st 2021 and made an offer that afternoon. Three weeks ago she finally became mine. The woodland is on the southern border of a much larger ancient broadleaf woodland, and contains a glorious mix of oaks, birches and hornbeam, all surrounded by a deep carpet of bluebells. There is a powerline running across it which provides a wonderful east-west opening in which rare orchids grow and wildlife surely abounds.  It is no exaggeration to say that this woodland occupies my every waking moment (and most of my sleeping ones). Our plan is to create a mini wildlife reserve, working from the soil invertebrates upwards. We have identified 14 habitats we want to nurture, including a wildflower meadow, properly-thick hedgerows and standing deadwood (one of the rarest yet most important habitats for woodland birds and beetles). We are writing a formal 300 year Woodland Management Plan which we will submit to the appropriate authorities. My intention is to be the ‘custodian’ for the first few decades, before handing it on to others to manage and preserve.

Since our key aim with the woodland is to enhance the flora and fauna it is necessary to gather data regarding the initial ecological baseline. We have initiated a number of surveys. The West Sussex Bat Society has even agreed to do a detailed bat tagging survey in early May. After some gentle begging they have agreed to let me come along. I have no idea what it will involve, or whether we will find anything (how do you even catch a bat?). It will involve staying up until 3am on a school night (a Thursday), but I can’t wait. Friday 7^th May will simply have to be a day when I keep my work diary just a little bit lighter than usual.

We bought (off eBay) a small 1980s caravan. Through some quirk of fate I had never set foot in a caravan until it arrived on our driveway. How can I have missed the excitement of caravans? My wife regarded me with a curious mix of pity, humour and disappointment as I enthusiastically shared every discovery I made of each new ingenious cupboard and hidey-hole. We towed it into the centre of the woodland, painted it grey, covered it with camouflage netting and installed a photovoltaic power supply*. We positioned it such that the view was deep into the woodland, with a badger set just 30m away.

A couple of weeks ago, after a long Saturday ‘woodlanding’ (that should definitely become a new verb!) I shut myself in the caravan at 5pm and settled down to my first serious session of wildlife watching. With the caravan door shut (badgers have a very strong sense of smell) I sat motionless scanning the view. As the temperature dropped my hands froze around my binoculars. My stomach rumbled but I wasn’t going to risk moving or making a noise. Also I was certain that there were numerous animals just beyond my eye-line who were deliberately waiting for me to turn my back so they could come and dance in front of the caravan while I wasn’t looking.

Three hours passed and not one creature of interest appeared. No badgers. No deer. No unicorns. Not even a sodding squirrel. Once the light had finally faded and my eyes were straining to see even a few yards I finally gave up. It was only 830pm but it was a cold early April night and I snuggled into my sleeping bag and lay looking out into the dark, apparently animal-free, woodland. Within minutes there was a loud hoot, followed by an answering call, and then a screech. Suddenly the woodland was alive with a growing glorious cacophony of woodland galumphing and owl calls (or potentially murder victims, it is a little hard to tell the difference). I woke at 430am feeling at more at one with the world than I have done for years. The woodland creatures were definitely present. They were just shy, that was all.

I bought a £25 motion-activated camera and installed it just in front of the badger set. Upon detecting movement it would take a photo, wait a second and then take 4 seconds of video. I left it 5 days and then downloaded the files. I had 44 different photos and videos (ie 88 in total). I was super excited to finally see my resident badgers frolicking in their natural habitat. Perhaps they would already have young? I opened the first file… Forty of the 44 videos were of a squirrel. I swear that he had worked out where the camera was and deliberately performed. It was like watching Scrat from Ice Age. He posed for each individual shot (‘I am ready for my close up Mr DeMille’). Video number 41 was of a fat, indulgent pigeon walking (not flying!) across the woodland floor. Shot number 42 was a fox being foxy in the middle of the night, slinking between the trees. No 43 was a rather beautiful Roe Deer which walked directly in front of the camera.

Finally I came to video number 44. It was taken at 3am on the night a couple of weeks ago when southern England was blanketed with snow. According to the camera sensor it was minus 3 degC. An animal – whatever it was -  came out of the badger set, and the camera snapped. By the time the video kicked in a second later the creature was already disappearing back into the set, with just some faint movements visible on the video. What is clear however is that it is not a badger. It is a mystery creature. Some people have said it is a rat. If it is, then it’s the biggest rat in England...

I have now repositioned the camera directly outside the entrance hole and re-programmed the camera to record video only. This is an ecology mystery that needs solving.

 

* The caravan now serves as my new office. Last week I did a number of zoom calls while sitting at a desk in the middle of the woodland. (‘Piers, I love that background screen, it looks so realistic….but could you turn off the distracting background bird noises?’).

No 188: Four Hundred and Seventeen and Rising

A year ago I wrote a blog outlining my 2020 New Year’s Resolution to achieve a personal carbon footprint of just 3 tonnes for the whole year. I had chosen 3 tonnes as my target simply because it was half the lowest-end of the average footprint of a UK citizen (which ranges between 6 – 10 tonnes/year). It was deliberately a ridiculously stretching target. Global CO2 levels were regularly bumping over 410ppm, significantly above the 380ppm ‘safe’ level and I wanted to see just how difficult/cumbersome/life-changing it would be to significantly reduce my footprint. The answer is: not very much.

A year on I can share that my carbon footprint for 2020 was 3.117 tonnes, rising to 4.631 tonnes if I include all my work-related activities. I missed my target, but not by much. More importantly I really didn’t need to change much in my life to achieve this reduction. It basically came down to just three things: travel, heating and diet.  

Of course, back in January 2020 ‘Covid19’ was a word we were just beginning to hear perhaps as the third item on a TV news report, usually after disheartening items on Brexit and the US election (it is somewhat depressing that the order may have changed but the same three stories still dominate…).  Little did I know back in January 2020 just how much the Covid19 pandemic would helping me hit my Resolution target.  For example, in 2019 I took 104 flights as part of my job. In 2020 I did just two. One might expect such a dramatic change to mean my work-life suffered, but that has not been the case. One of the few positives to come out of this dreadful pandemic is the rapid, almost universal acceptance that most work-related meetings can be done virtually. Either that or all those face-to-face meetings I have been dutifully having with my overseas clients all these years was actually a waste of time. They didn’t want to see me after all. Perhaps I can earn more by getting people to pay me to stay away.  

In early April we bought a 100% electric car. This further helped ensure that my carbon footprint remained low when the lockdown was (temporarily) lifted. Not content with this, I went one step further and in November got myself banned from driving for 6 months. And yes, regular readers, this is my second such driving ban in 4 years. You would think I would learn. You would be wrong.

My second area of focus was on heating my home. In early March, literally 2 days before Lockdown One commenced, an Air-Source Heat pump was installed at our home, taking us completely off the gas grid. The cost was minimal due to government grants, and the heating is just as good, if not better, than a traditional boiler. Slightly worryingly, 9 months after having been disconnected from the gas grid my local gas supply company is still estimating our usage and sending regular bills. When I ring them they acknowledge that this is wrong, say they will sort it, and then send another bill a few weeks later.

Looking at the data for my electricity usage during 2020 it has risen in as we enter winter, but this is because it now includes all our usual home electronics, plus the contribution for powering the Air Source Heat pump, plus the contribution from charging our electric car (my wife still selfishly drives despite me petitioning her to join me in my driving ban). There is a minor off-set to our grid-electricity footprint due to the PV panels we have installed on our rooftop. These panels are almost 10 years old and, rather annoyingly, at the height of the glorious 2020 summer the invertor failed. It took 29 days to get it fixed and I estimate this ‘cost’ me about 100kg of carbon (29 days at 0.28kgCO2/kWh x 12 kWh/day). 

My final focus area was my diet. In 2019 I followed a pretty standard meat based diet, which has a carbon footprint of around 5.6kg/day. From Jan 1^st 2020 I started eating more pescatarian, vegetarian and vegan meals. It wasn’t a hardship. It was a pleasure. I am not a vegetarian (I still eat meat every now and then) but I just eat less. I do however feel a little grumpy that it took 51 years for me to discover Oat Milk. How can something that is so irrefutably tastier (and better for you) than any other type of milk still be some sort of grocery secret. Mad. My average food carbon footprint during 2020 was 4.4kg/day, putting me just between a low-meat eater and a pescatarian/vegetarian.

So as we enter 2021 I have a new goal: 2.5 tonnes/year. I share this news because today, for the first time since humans first appeared on the planet, our atmospheric carbon levels are at 417ppm, and are rising steadily. We have to change. All of us. If the above shows anything it is that reducing our carbon footprint really isn’t that hard. I honestly wish it had been harder so that I could claim some proper environmental glory. I have written this blog for 5.5 years. Over Christmas the cumulative number of visits to my blogsite finally passed 50,000. I briefly felt rather pleased about this, until my youngest son put a 1 minute music video on TikTok. In 4 days he has had 180,000 hits (that’s 2000 times my blogs frequency).

I need to find a way to get this message into a 30 second music clip, preferably with someone falling over or dancing provocatively. Any volunteers?