European snow vole discovered in Portugal

A wildlife photographer discovered, by chance, the European snow vole (Chionomys nivalis) in the summer of 2014, in Montesinho, North of Portugal. This is the first record for this species in the country and was published in Italian Journal of Zoology on 2 November.

Gonçalo didn’t know what he was looking at. Two little “strange” mice passing by, on a summer night in 2014, in a gorse and heather meadow in Montesinho mountain region, at 1300 m. The infrared images recorded by a camera that he placed under a big rock confronted him with a different kind of mouse. “It was a species that I didn’t recognise. I couldn’t tell what it was. It was a very peculiar animal”, he told Wilder.

This wildlife photographer was in Montesinho looking for mammals for an awareness conservation project. But it turned out that his images helped science discover a new species to Portugal. “Everything happened by chance”, he said.

Gonçalo sent his images to a team of biologists in UTAD University (Universidade de Trás-os-Montes e Alto Douro), in Bragança district. Soon enough they realized it was a new species of mammal no one had ever seen in the country. Could it be a snow vole? There were no historic records of it in Portugal. There was still a lot of work to do.

That same team of biologists travelled to Montesinho in October 2014, to a place called Lama Grande, to look for the mouse and to be sure. They set 27 traps, baited with fresh apples and carrots, and with hydrophobous cotton as bedding material.

“We were able to capture two snow voles, an adult male and a juvenile female”, said Hélia Vale-Gonçalves, a biologist working with small mammals at UTAD, and one of the paper authors. “The animals were weighed and sexed, and the reproductive status and standard biometric measurements were recorded. Also, tissue samples were collected”. Then, the mice were released at the trapping location.

Next to the traps “we found many traces of snow voles’ presence, such as little tunnels on the vegetation and lots of galleries”, she told Wilder.

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