The crab-apple store

 

Here's a sight that puzzled me, during a walk last week around and over Cley Hill in Wiltshire. (In the muddy dusk Cley Hill seemed twice as steep as usual.)

Anyway, before I reached the hill I passed a crap-apple tree: in this almost monochrome landscape the apples strewn across the ground were the only note of brightness. 

The interesting thing was that at the base of this tree and its neighbour the apples had been heaped up into two stores. The heap contained whole apples, nibbled apples and fragments. What animal did this?

My book on animal signs, Spårboken (a Swedish translation of a Danish book by Preben Bang and Preben Dahlström), didn't really help me, but what it says is interesting in its own right:

Apples

Rodents

The eating marks of small rodents can commonly be studied on apples, both in natural places and in fruit stores. In general animals eat both the flesh and the skin, and the gnawing is easily discerned by the many small toothmarks along the gnawed edges and by the long cavities that the lower rodent teeth make in the flesh of the fruit. It's often difficult to determine from the gnawing exactly which animal species is responsible. By the size of the toothmarks you can always tell if the gnawing was done by an animal the size of e.g. a squirrel, rat or water vole, or by a mouse-size animal; the toothmarks of the former are at least double the size of the latter. A definite ID can only be made by taking into account other animal signs, the location, etc. 

[Birds, the authors note, don't eat the skin of apples, so they tend to hollow them out. Thrushes eat the flesh. Crossbills eat the pips, hence they favour small varieties.]

On today's revisit I saw the toothmarks (rather small), and also the animal holes lurking behind the stores at the base of the hollow trunks.

Windfall crabs. The two apple stores are at the back, at the foot of the trees

Windfall crab-apples.

Cley Hill from Little Cley Hill, 8 January 2021