Derek Crawley's 2.6 Challenge - blog #3
Here is the last blog in our series of 2.6 Challenge fundraisers' reports. This one comes from Derek Crawley, founder member of the Staffordshire Mammal Group and co-author of the Atlas of the Mammals of Great Britain and Northern Ireland.
When Pam Worrall started her 2.6 Challenge and asked if others would join her I thought that should be easy to record 26 different mammals especially in the 26 weeks leading up to National Mammal Week in October.
The difficulty was trying to do it under lockdown! I didn't want to have to go out of my way but just see them on my daily exercise or on shopping trips. This worked out well with evening walks to the local mill ponds with bat detector in hand or scanning fields with night vision equipment for rabbit hare and foxes. Finding field signs of deer, moles and badgers on walks, and the sad road kills on the way to town. Mammal trapping helped to pick up the common small mammals. That got me to 23 quite quickly but also almost out of options for local mammals.
I didn't count the house mouse caught in my house the week before the challenge, nor the dead water shrew or yellow necked mouse I recorded the month before but haven't seen since.
Once lockdown was over and I could travel for work, including trips to Scotland, Whitby and Kent with records not normally seen in my local Staffordshire or Shropshire, I managed to record sightings of both types of seal, sika deer, red squirrels and porpoise, minke whale and bottle nosed whale, which brought my total to 32. Only seven of these from field signs, I managed to see the rest!
Below is a table listing the mammals signs and sightings recorded by our three fundraisers during the challenge (remember they were only allowed to record each mammal once...it's harder than it sounds!).
| DEREK | PAM | MERRYL | |
| Badger | x | x | x |
| Bank Vole | x | x | x |
| Brown Rat | x | x | x |
| Common Pipistrelle | x | x | x |
| Field Vole | x | x | x |
| Fox | x | x | x |
| Grey Seal | x | x | x |
| Grey Squirrel | x | x | x |
| Hedgehog | x | x | x |
| Noctule bat | x | x | x |
| Mole | x | x | x |
| Rabbit | x | x | x |
| Roe deer | x | x | x |
| Soprano Pipistrelle | x | x | x |
| Wood mouse | x | x | x |
| Brown hare | x | x | |
| Common seal | x | x | |
| Common shrew | x | x | |
| Daubentons bat | x | x | |
| Fallow deer | x | x | |
| Harvest mouse | x | x | |
| Leislers bat | x | x | |
| Muntjac deer | x | x | |
| Otter | x | x | |
| Water vole | x | x | |
| Brown long-eared bat | x | ||
| Chinese Water Deer | x | ||
| Dormouse | x | ||
| Edible dormouse | x | ||
| Greater horseshoe bat | x | ||
| Harbour porpoise | x | ||
| House mouse | x | ||
| Minke Whale | x | ||
| Nathusius's pipistrelle | x | ||
| Polecat | x | ||
| Porpoise | x | ||
| Pygmy shrew | x | ||
| Red Deer | x | ||
| Red Squirrel | x | ||
| Serotine bat | x | ||
| Sika Deer | x | ||
| Stoat | x | ||
| Yellow-necked mouse | x | ||
| Beaver | x | ||
| Bottle Nosed Whale | x |
If you are planning to fundraise for the Mammal Society THANK YOU! A great place to start is our JustGiving or Virgin Money Giving pages. That way we can keep track of what you’re doing and encourage you along the way. Do drop us a line at pr@themammalsociety.org to let us know what you’re doing and be sure to tag us on social media!
For more inspiration why not read the other blogs in this series? Click here for Pam Worrall’s blog. Click here for Merryl Gelling's blog.