This rather large excavation appeared overnight

There was a hole at the back which was too small for a rabbit, but with this level of output we couldn’t think what could have made it and so quickly.

So obviously this needed to be investigated further:

We have had the trap camera trained onto the pile for a week now and it has taken hundreds of photos. There was a vast amount of activity through the nights and all by one little animal – a Wood Mouse.

Can this little animal really be responsible for all this?

Elsewhere, we have a new mystery species appearing in the pond. Several colonies each of hundreds of red worms and every single worm thrashing around wildly..

 

So these are not very good photos – we need to buy an underwater camera – but perhaps you can make out these worms. And they are all waving around. We have looked them up and found that they are Tubifex. There are 13 different Tubifex worms and we don’t know which these are, but we do know that they have their heads burrowed into the silt while their tails wiggle in the water. Their bodies have haemoglobin which gives them their red colour and this is to help them get in sufficient oxygen if they are in polluted conditions. If the water is disturbed they all disappear immediately into their individual burrows.

Weird but strangely fascinating – and how did these colonies arrive in the pond?

Finally, there have now been sightings of three different slow worms under the reptile sampling mats, of which this is the largest and most impressive: