Things to look out for in the garden - June

This is the one month of the year, apart from November, when you might see some of our rarer and lovelier small mammals in your garden. Let's start though, by laying to rest that awful myth that there is one rat for every person in Britain. It really is a myth. During the late Victorian period, when something called the 'Home Compendium' was popular, people wrote to the newspapers asking questions and they answers were gathered into Compendia and sold back to the householders once a year. One questioner asked a London editor how may rats there were in London - nobody knew the answer so a journalist who'd written an article about the rat-catching trade was asked to make a guess. He airily said 'Oh I reckon there's one rat for every Londoner' and so the myth was born. Nobody knows how many rats there are, and it's probably a lot less than you've been led to believe. How many rats have you seen in your life? If there was one rat for every person, you'd expect to have seen a lot more, wouldn't you?

Rats apart, what might you see this month? The common shrew is a tiny - two to three inch - brownish grey coat and lighter under-parts, it has beady black eyes and a long twitching nose and moves like greased lighting! The common shrew is found anywhere that has reasonable cover, so if you leave a few flowerpots or bits of wood in a sheltered corner, you are very likely to bump into a shrew at some point.

The house mouse is bigger than the common shrew at around three to four inches and has grey brown fur. It is mouse-shaped, obviously, being longer and less rounded than the shrew, with a blunter nose and a much more elongated tail. It's nocturnal, so you are most likely to see it at dusk or early in the morning. Amazingly, the house mouse is becoming rare as we exclude it from any chance of finding its way into our dwellings - but a few sunflower seeds in the shed will give it a fighting chance of survival, as will putting a bell round your cat's neck.

Several varieties of ladybird appear in the garden this month - ladybirds should be cherished for their beauty, their aphid-consuming prowess and their friendly nature - but our native species are under threat. The Harlequin ladybird tends to be rounder in shape than most UK native species, it has a white plate with a big black M-shaped marking on it, just behind the head and may be red or orange. It out competes the native species, depriving them of food, and has even been known to turn cannibal on the five and seven spot ladybird. Report harlequin sightings to the UK charity, Buglife.

Garden June ladybird photograph by David Prior, used under a creative commons attribution licence.

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