Mice and men’s best laid plans for harvest

It’s been a month since the first of the cornfields around the village was razed to stubble and the straw ploughed in to reveal again the rich brown earth. Now, the last of the grain hoppers has rumbled through the narrow lanes, the near-constant hum of distant machinery is stilled and the cereal harvest is over for another year.
I love feeling connected to this ancient rhythm, once the dominant pulse of life itself. Each year, if I get the chance, I’ll ask the people driving the combines how it’s going; I follow some East Anglian farming accounts on Instagram and read their updates, and check the Farmers Weekly website for news on how harvest is unfolding across the UK.
So much more can be controlled for these days compared to a century ago, but by no means everything, and with so many variables — from weather to crop varieties, pests to rotations — the outcome of decisions made months and even years ago still hangs in the balance. It’s an exciting, and worrying, time.
I walked the margin of a wheatfield early one morning, before the day had heated up. The tall grass around it had been mown in preparation for harvest, but it would be another week or so before the crop itself, golden and uniform, was cut. On the shorn headland I found a tightly woven ball of dry grass about the same shape and size as an avocado. Picking it up and marvelling at its lightness and impregnability, it took a moment before I realised what it was.
Harvest mice are Europe’s tiniest rodents, weighing as little as a two-pence coin. They are a rich russet-gold, with white tummies, the huge black eyes befitting a nocturnal animal, and a long, prehensile tail. I have seen one in the wild only once, and it was not only dead but partially digested: regurgitated most likely by an owl.
Due to their secretive habits you’re more likely to spot a nest than see a live one: several are built each summer, usually at shin or knee height, some for sleeping in, others as temporary shelters, and some, the most solidly built, for rearing young. Incredibly, a ball of grass the size of a tennis ball can be home to a female and up to eight tiny pups.
Harvest mice are hard to monitor, so data is patchy: in some parts of Britain they seem to be relatively common, mainly in southern and eastern England, but nationally they are classed as rare and are thought to be declining; something the growing adoption of nature-friendly farming practices could still turn around.
All summer the last few logs from last year’s wood delivery have been stacked in my hearth, waiting for the first evening chilly enough to light the burner — but recently I’ve noticed the pile has been making a faint ticking or rasping sound.
Then I found a winged, narrow-waisted insect bashing itself against my window, trying to get out; a few days later, another, and then a third. They were solitary wasps from the Ectemnius genus, which nest in decaying timber. Last year a female will have excavated a tunnel into some dead wood, perhaps when the tree was still standing; then, she will have laid her eggs, each in a separate cell. She will have hunted several flies, most likely hoverflies, immobilising them to provide food for her young when they hatched.
Now they were emerging into my living room, using their toothed mandibles to gnaw their way out of my logs. Needless to say, I made sure they all found their way out into the fresh air.
As someone who has spent many years finding ways to connect people to nature, it’s exciting to see people enthusiastically identifying plants, birds and insects via AI-assisted tools on their phones. Friends who’ve hitherto shown zero interest in ornithology send me screenshots from their birdsong recognition app; social media is awash with people identifying plants via Google Lens.
So I feel like a Grinch when pointing out how many of these identifications are wrong. Often, it’s because the apps are trained on data scraped from the internet, much of which is junk; additionally, many pay no heed to the time of year or users’ location when offering suggestions (Visual Look Up on iPhone is horribly US-biased).
Even the great Merlin, trained on verified data from ornithologists, doesn’t identify birdsong correctly all the time. Yet many people I speak to don’t seem to mind if the result isn’t accurate: what they want is the pleasure of sating a passing curiosity without having to navigate any complexity or doubt. The facts matter less than the feeling that nature is easily knowable.
Perhaps, as in today’s political arena, “truthiness”, not truth, is enough.
Find out more about Encounter, a free nature journalling app Melissa is developing, at encounter-nature.com