The wood mouse/ field mouse is our commonest mouse. Its favoured habitat is hedgerows, scrub, field margins, and mature grassland.

It is along with voles, the most predated animal in Britain. It is on the menu of foxes, stoats, weasels, kestrels, owls, and any other animal quick enough to catch them.

Almost wholly nocturnal it is active for most of the hours of darkness, feeding on seeds, berries, fruit, insects, and any other edible scrap it chances upon.

Although on the menu for many, it is not an easy catch. It is fast on its feet, quick on the turn, and an agile jumper and climber.

I have seen them climb a bush to the very end of a branch to get a last berry, lose its balance, only to flick its tail round the branch to pull itself back on to the branch top again.

They seem to have a surprisingly large territory for their size, navigating by landmark, and using the same routes home to safety, which is mostly a tunnel in the ground, not always in cover. If you see a very rounded tunnel about an inch across, it is very probably the home of a wood mouse.

The old adage that a wood mouse can always find its way home seems to be true.

Every winter, when they seek shelter and warmth, I live trap them out of my loft at home and set them free in the garden at what I thought was a distance far enough away to prevent them coming back.

After releasing mice every day, I was persuaded that it was the same mice coming back, and I should mark them on the back with a little nail varnish to identify them.

Sure enough, I caught and released the same individuals up to three times.

No mean feat for them as it meant traversing the garden for about 60 feet, down a wall, under the garage door, climb up a harled wall in the garage, and into the house loft from there!

 

A beneficial effect of their tiny but noticeable tunnels is that they are used as nests by two species of bumblebees, innocently helping to keep up numbers of this essential pollinator.