Every Nibble Helps

Three GoodGymers made an appearance at Perivale Woods to participate in the third harvest mouse release at that site. The harvest mice are the UK and Europe’s smallest and possibly cutest rodents. They love living in messy hedgerows and brambles, that are constantly being cut back, often by the GoodGymers! Destructive human activity makes the animal habitats fragmented, and the pockets of wildlife, without corridors to each other, shortly disappear. The harvest mice were believed to be extinct in Ealing, and before Ealing Wildlife Group's project to bring them back into the wild, they were last seen in 1979 in Perivale. Last year saw several releases of mice in Ealing meadows, followed by field surveys, which found their nests - a sign that the project has been successful!

The sunny morning brought to the event many residents and GoodGym's friends from other groups - Friends of both Grove and Horsenden Farm: Sue, Fred and Livio. Elsa from the neighbouring Horsenden Farm was also around, attending to the cows grazing in the field.

The release participants marched calmly through the Perivale Woods, which are normally closed to the public, to the area by the ponds - the mice's new home. Keeping gentle and quiet was necessary when carrying tanks with the animals to spare the mice extra stress during the relocation. To promote the genetic diversity of the rodents, different tanks contained male and female mice from different backgrounds: some bred in Horsenden, others in Battersea, Dorset or Scotland.

The Scottish lasses, that the GoodGymers were releasing didn't live up to their feisty reputation. They behaved rather timidly, apart from Sevan's girl mouse who nibbled at his thumb when he clasped his hands around her. When she was out in the open, Sevan's mouse clumsily slipped off his arm and plunged into the scrub, Kat's mouse on the other hand knew pretty well what to do and jumped confidently into her new life, and Kash's took the wrong turn and walked up the GoodGymer's arm. Kat took some fantastic photos of the mice which you can see in the report.

On the way back, a group of GoodGymers and other mice releasers got carried away, marvelling at the surrounding nature, bug hotels and the hedgehog estates. They lost their way and wandered deeper into the forest! Luckily, an attentive girl spotted that the way back looked different than the original route and called it out. That was the end of quite a pleasant detour. Before heading home, the GoodGymers visited a unique straw bale house, The Bluebell Centre, chatted with the creators of the building about its history and had been invited to come back in spring to admire the fabulous bluebell display in the woods.