Following on from yesterday evening’s post about the stoat stealing eggs, I read up about it’s habits and learnt that they keep food stashes in various locations. So this morning we had a look around.
This is what we found under one of the nest boxes:
No wonder our egg numbers kept dropping! Looking closer at the last photo from the wildlife camera yesterday, as it was illuminated by the infra-red lamp, underneath the nest box you could just see these eggs from the camera’s low viewpoint (circled):
We then started to look around and found other stashes of eggs – this one was under an unused wooden ark:
This had both whole and eaten eggs. But we found holes everywhere with eggs in them.
We have put some obstacles in place to make it more difficult and I am placing the wildlife camera outside the run to see what happens today.