With its meadows now full of wild flowers going to seed, Rodley Nature Reserve, to the west of Leeds, is a perfect habitat for harvest mice.
My photographs were taken in the visitor centre there where a large vivarium contains a captive colony. Since 2012, 900 harvest mice have been released here.
They build tennis-ball sized nests amongst the stems of reeds and grasses.
As it clambers about amongst vegetation, the harvest mouse uses its long tail to grasp stems.
One morning last week, after a wild and windy night, we found this nest, which I think was made by goldfinches, on the lawn at the foot of the rowan in the front garden. It’s just three inches (8 cm) across and very light. There were no signs of eggs or chicks in or around it, so I think that it had been dislodged by the wind, rather than raided by a predator, such as a magpie or cat.
It’s composed mainly of frizzy wool-like material, which might be dog hair, wool or even some manmade down. It is too long and curly to be thistle down. The nest is decorated with strands of moss around the outside with a few long threads curled around the inside of the cup, which are possibly horse hair but more likely textile thread. As I went out to measure it just now, a week after it fell, I noticed a tiny rove beetle amongst the fibres in the centre of the cup.
A month or more ago, a goldfinch was singing from the telephone cables near the rowan tree and sometimes there would be a pair of them perching there, so I wondered if they had a nest nearby.
It’s been a good year for goldfinches and garden birds in general, with young bullfinches, chaffinches, blackbirds, starlings, blue tits and great tits coming to our back garden bird feeders, but goldfinches are the most numerous. Yesterday a flock – a charm to use the collective noun – of goldfinches flew up from feeding on the fluffy seed-heads of creeping thistle in the meadow by the wood.
