What animals chew up your hazelnuts or the like? What creatures leave disgusting (or fascinating for scientific naturalists) undigested pellets of food or even faeces around your property? Two Danes can tell you. A derogatory word here a few days ago about the indifferent nut-producing capacity of hazels was retracted when, in taking a knife to a rod from the bush, some leaves were swept aside to reveal the ground carpeted with what must have been a square yard covered with half-shells by hundreds of the same hazel nuts. All kernels gone, of course.
The knowledgeable Danes, Preben Bang and Preben Dahlstrom, have produced a work which tells you all you want to know about animals, and perhaps a little more than some would relish. They can tell you what animals have done the damage from the open, gnawed nut. First they tell you about the positioning of the teeth. "In most rodents," they say, "the upper lip has a slit (the so-called hare lip) which allows the incisors to work freely. And there are thickenings between the incisors teeth and cheek to close off the rear part of the mouth cavity to prevent splinters from entering the mouth or throat, during the gnawing." Likely that most of the hazel nuts mentioned above were the work of wood mice, field mice and squirrels.
The book goes far in showing how holes in various nuts - beech nuts, the stones of sloes and plums and cherries, are the work of different animals and birds. In colour. Much more. The book starts with the tracks of many animals, of birds; feeding signs (damage signs) on various trees at root level, overground and high overhead. And the different appearance of wood thus stripped. One shoot is bitten off by a deer, another by a hare. The hare does the clean job.
Then we get into the digestive area with pictures of the pellets which many birds throw up - rejected matter: bits of beetles, bones of small animals, grass, pebbles even. Then, of course, their excretions, all pictured actual size. It is, to say the least, a gutsy book. It is Collins Guide to Animal Tracks and Signs, written by the two above-mentioned and translated and published in English in 1974. There is more, and much more, of a non-anatomical nature. Y