Small Mammal Camera Trapping

This project is available for public Spotting but Trapping is restricted. If you would like to join this project as a Trapper please contact us at info@mammalweb.org.

This project uses specially adapted camera traps to study small mammals such as mice, voles, and shrews.

While camera traps sometimes detect small mammals such as wood mouse, and very occasionally a vole or shrew, it is often not possible to identify these to species level. This project is intended to obtain image sequences on which species can be identified, at least some of the time. Different set-ups may achieve this result, but an effective one involves a trail camera with a magnifying lens on the end of a 40 cm box tunnel with a transparent lid, and some food bait at the other end. The idea came from Nick Littlewood, an ecologist currently working with Conservation Evidence and Editor of the Mammal Atlas of North-East Scotland and the Cairngorms (see further here). Close-focus lenses are, or were, obtainable with the Bushnell Natureview, but the stick-on-with-Blu-tac method is cheaper than a new camera. Registered users of MammalWeb can check out the links in our related news articles from 08-11-2018 and 13-11-2018 (but only when logged in to the site), for helpful guides on modifying camera traps for small mammals, and making box-tunnels to go with modified cameras.

If you are already using a camera trap in this way to study small mammals, we would love to hear from you! Please get in touch by emailing: info@mammalweb.org.

This project has the following subprojects:

Shrew monitoring in Britain