Things have been happening in the mouse house, I just don’t know what they are.
The story from the week is that as from the 9th March I started to see daily visits into the mouse house. Then on the 10th a very long visit of around 5 minutes, much longer than anything I’ve seen before.
During the visit on the 10th I could also see some movement in the newspaper. Unfortunately I was recording in multiscreen and the Mouse video was pretty small. I zoomed in a couple of stills but they were inconclusive.
Then on the 11th the number of visits exploded. I was seeing a mouse enter literally every couple of minutes over several hours, from 05:30 to 08:00. These were very quick visits, each of only a few seconds.
Very very unfortunately it was impossible to see clearly as the tricky little mouse was spending it’s time in the house under the camera, in my blind spot. Unbelievable bad luck.
I had a slightly longer visit at 09:45 in the morning, see video below.
Then the mouse arrived at 10:04 and stayed until 10:29, again underneath the camera so I didn’t get a clean view. However this was by far the longest time a mouse has spent in the house. Was it eating, resting or something else?
What I do know is that after the burst of activity, which finished with the long visit at 10:29 the situation returned more or less to normal. An occasional visit over the next days and in general the mouse is spending its time in the house under the camera.
I’m not sure what to conclude from all this. Is the mouse building a nest under the camera? The repeated visits could have been to bring in nesting material, although I couldn’t see anything obvious in its mouth. Perhaps the visits were to build up a food store which the mouse is now dipping in to. On a basic level I don’t know if this was a single mouse or many different mice or if it is a Male or Female. My list of unknowns is long.
I also caughta few glimpses of a mouse in the habitat pile at night, taken on the trail camera. On the video below the mouse eyes are showing up on the right hand side of the pile of garden waste, at the bottom of which is the mouse house. (You need to look closely)
It’s great that the house is being used for something, but I’ll need to keep watching for more clues to understand exactly what is going on.
Chatou Nature Blog 