The Daily Dormouse. (aka Bike) Part 1707 by Angharad Copyright © 2012 Angharad All Rights Reserved.

After dinner, I asked Danny to come with me, and after changing into some old clothes we returned to the woodland where the nest boxes had been vandalised. I had some old ones in the shed which we loaded into the car along with some old cable to tie them to the trees.

We had to make two journeys which had Danny grumbling but he stayed with me and we finally had four new nest boxes up which replaced about half of those damaged. “Is that it?” he asked.

I pulled open the large rucksack I’d carried on our last trip from the car, I started to assemble bits of equipment, he began to recognise what I was doing and why and he smirked, “Cool,” was all he said.

I left him to watch over it while I went back to the car one last time and returned with a ladder. He helped me install the equipment which was quite well hidden in a holly tree, including the battery. I went back to the car and asked him to walk about the site near the nest boxes, I watched on the laptop and it was all working. I went and got him and we went home.

“You’re clever, aren’t you, Mum?”

“Not terribly, but I hope I’m brighter than our vandal.”

“Will they come back?”

“I have no idea, kiddo, but the battery will last about two weeks and the sender unit should have the range to get to this lappie,” I patted the old computer, which had given me such good service.

“So how does it work?”

“It’s triggered by movement, so we could have loads of pictures of blue tit’s bums or curious squirrels noses.”

“What if someone pinches it?”

“I hope we’ll have a close up of their face if they do, but they’d have to be prepared to scramble up in a holly tree, without a ladder—I think it unlikely.”

“Won’t the branches of the tree set it off if there’s a wind, I mean?”

“No, I’ve programmed it for a longer focus than the tree and it has a facility to ignore background movement.”

“You are clever, Mum.”

“Not me, kiddo, I didn’t do all the clever stuff, I just knew where to find one and talked the university into buying it.”

“When will you know if it’s worked?”

“At home, we should be able to scan the site.”

“Won’t it be dark?”

“Yes, the clever stuff is it films in infra-red, so it also picks up on heat, which is how it ignores the background stuff.”

“Wow, that’s brilliant.”

“Yeah, just a bit. The military use them all the time.”

“Cool,” as soon as I mentioned military, he flipped into typical boy. “Do they use them for killing people?”

“I have no idea what they use them for, but the guy who sold it to us told me the army buy most of them, and the police.”

“So why couldn’t they have set one up?”

“Because a few broken nest boxes are hardly a police priority, are they?”

“They should be?”

“I quite agree, but they don’t and as they make the rules they do as they wish.”

We arrived home and Danny insisted we show the girls what we’d been doing, Trish wasn’t terribly impressed, especially with the quality of picture, then a bat flew directly in front of the camera sensor and she changed her mind.

“Can I have one of those for my birthday?”

“We’ll see,” I said while thinking—not at the price we paid for that—you won’t.

I have a programme which shows me if there has been any activity on the camera, usually it’s because something like a deer walks across and starts feeding, or two pigeons are bonking on the end of the branch it’s fixed to. It showed very little as I’d expected it to do. Then on the following Wednesday afternoon, there was something to watch.

I phoned Tom and asked him to come and see it, he was busy so I did some marking—it’s the thing which makes me least happy about being a teacher—the standard of literacy is appalling and often from kids who went to private schools.

He was as surprised as I was and suggested we have a meeting to see what we could do about it. I agreed and set about arranging it for the next day. An hour later I got a call from Darren.

“Did you put up some new nest boxes?”

“Yeah. Last week.”

“Well they’ve been done.”

“Done?”

“Yeah, vandalised. Want me to take some photos?”

“You could do.”

“I’ll call by tomorrow with them.”

“If you could do so about eleven, that would be brilliant, Darren. I know Tom would be grateful to see them, it might help us get a grant for some new ones.”

“I think I can do eleven.”

“Great, see you then.”

I called Andy Bond and asked his opinion from a legal point of view.

“That’s a tough one, Cathy, it’s vandalism but it’s public access woodland.”

“No it isn’t, it’s fenced off, you need a key to get into it.”

“Is it privately owned, then?”

“Yes, the university leases it for a peppercorn rent, we have all sorts of ecological experiments and surveys going on.”

“Criminal trespass, criminal damage—harming a protected species of animal, that’s about the best I can do, if you get witness statements, we’ll always try to help protect wildlife—you know—stealing birds eggs and so on.”

“Thanks, Andy, it gives me some idea about it.”

“Give me a shout if I can help further.”

“I will, take care.” He rang off and I went back to my marking and tearing my hair out: why do people spell definite with an A? I can only presume they spell by phonetics rather than word pattern recognition, which was how I learned.

“Have you caught him yet?” asked Danny at dinner.

“Not quite but tomorrow could prove interesting, those nest boxes we put up have been vandalised according to Darren.”

“So did you get it on film?”

“I’ll tell you tomorrow.”

“Huh?”

“I’m talking with Darren tomorrow, so I’ll wait till we have his views on it?”

“Oh—he wasn’t much use with those two creeps who were going to cut that baby cow, was he?”

“Calf, Danny, a baby cow is a calf.”

The next day I did my lecture and met up with Tom at half ten, we agreed a strategy for the meeting and waited for Darren to arrive. He came and sat down pulling photos from the file he was carrying.

“Same as before, by the look of it?”

“Yeah,” he agreed, “thank goodness there were no dormice in them.”

“Absolutely,” I concurred, “however, we know he looks in them first before he wrecks them.”

“Yeah—what? He looks in ‘em first—how can you possibly know that?”

“We saw him do it?”

“What?”

“We set up a camera with a sender unit, we have film of it happening, would you like to see?” I turned my laptop round for him to see the screen.”

He suddenly sat very still and almost shrank in the seat.

“I only have one question, Darren, why?”

“I dunno, I suppose I just felt angry that people like me do the spadework and you sit on your arse in an office and get the plaudits.”

“I’d like ye tae resign yer course,” said Tom when the conversation went quiet.

“Yeah okay. I suppose it’s too late to say I’m sorry.” He stood up and walked to the door.

“It’s never too late to apologise, but you forget that I set up these sites and spent hundreds of hours surveying them on my own because it wasn’t sexy to like dormice then—now it’s very popular. I’d have been happy to allow you to continue researching your sites for a PhD, I know Professor Agnew would have supported it.”

I looked at Tom and he nodded.

“So you’ve blown two degrees. Goodbye, Darren.”

“Ye’ll have tae train up anither researcher?”

“Yeah, but one or two of the first years want dormice—perhaps we’ll let then have some.”

“Is that wise?”

I shrugged because I had no answer to it.