February UMAC Surveys: Spotlight from Southampton MammalWatch

This week's UMAC blog is brought to you by our Southampton team! For more information about UMAC, visit our UMAC web page.

Hello Mammal Lovers!

This month has been very eventful (and very cold) and we thought we'd keep you in the loop of what Team Southampton are getting up to as the University Mammal Challenge begins across the country. The team is made up of Jack 'Batman' Merrifield, a PhD student researching our flying friends, Owen Middleton who works on big cats, Carla Broom, a genius with small mammals, Frances Mullany who loves all creatures great and small, and myself, Georgia Harper.

We are very excited to really be getting into doing species surveys and transects of the area, so I thought we'd kick things off with. round up some of the highlights of of what we found in February…

On the 2nd, our camera traps were deployed! This meant we could start getting pictures and videos of some of the large mammals which might be trying to get to their 9am lectures. Three days later, we conducted our first successful small mammal survey and found three wood mice using Longworth traps. 

The next day, we found two roe deer on the camera traps, the pictures of which made it on to the actual Mammal Society page! It’s amazing to think that there are such big mammals as a deer roaming about campus, especially with all the main roads they have to navigate to get around.

On the 19th, we conducted another overnight small mammal survey, and found four wood mice (including Speedy Gonzales) and the camera traps also picked up two red foxes.

Finally, we found our first bats of the season on the 21st, both Common and Soprano Pipistrelle, of which Owen got an awesome video! Now when I say this was the most exciting thing to happen all year, I’m not exaggerating. I wasn’t even doing this transect that evening and the amount of texts I received in a couple of minutes pretty much broke my phone.

Species in this instalment: Wood mouse, roe deer, red fox, common pipistrelle, soprano pipistrelle.

This is team Southampton MammalWatch, keeping you in the loop of our Mammals' Tail. #SotonMammals