Following on from yesterday's news about Lars Thomas's analysis of the hairs found near South Park, on the outskirts of Woolsery over Easter, we can follow it up with news on the second of the batches of hair samples which Lars took back to Denmark with him. He writes:"Have just finished (except for one hair) the hairs from Huddisford Wood. 32 hairs altogether - nothing very special-24 dog hairs, 6 badger, 1 rodent of some kind, probably mouse, but to short to be certain of species. That leaves one broken hair, that may be interesting. It is black, broken and rather worn. It's also fairly big. That may be interesting, but that calls for a bit more microscopic power than I have at home right now, so I have to make an appointment at the museum first. Stay tuned!"
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Might I suggest an approach more suited to experimental biology than naturalism be taken on this matter now?
In America and Canada, scientists have found that the best method of assessing big cat populations is by hair analysis of samples collected on what they call rub-strips. These consist of a sacking backing, with carpet grippers and barbed wire in front of this, baited with synthetic catnip.
The strips are placed about a metre off the ground level, high enough that a domestic cat, whilst attracted, would have difficulty in reaching them. The advantage of using such hair samplers as these is that they are unlikely to be stolen, are very cheap to make and deploy, and work rather well; peppering a number of sites such as field gateways and the like would probably work at least as well as camera trapping.
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