Tuesday 13 March 2007

Feeding Station




Chatting to a lady this evening who told me that, earlier in the day, this larder on the left had been empty, but by evening it was full again. I wonder why they make and store these piles of chopped grass?
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At 6.15pm a vole swam from somewhere upstream down to the bank near the pipe and disappeared. I report all sightings to John Harding at the Wood Lane Nature Reserve (see Whitchurch Water Vole Group link on right).
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There are now five trolleys in the brook, all of them collecting debris and muck. But dragging them out will cause damage to the banks. It's a real problem.

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

Sorry about the continuing trolley saga. I can see that unless you get them lifted vertically, which may mean a paddle, they’ll cause at least as much damage on the way out as on the way in. Are NSDC and the EA still coming this week? They may have some innovative solution.

Good to see the voles trying to ignore what’s going on around them. Are they as active as they were this time last year, I wonder?

Kate said...

This time last year I didn't even know for sure there were water voles in that stretch of brook. I knew they'd been there, because I'd been seeing them off and on since 1990, but it had been a while since I'd had any sightings. Then, at the start of May 2006, there seemed to be a population explosion and it became very easy to spot them.

So the answer is, I don't know. It's warm for the time of year, so that might have brought them out slightly earlier than usual. Numbers won't increase, obviously, till breeding starts in April. Then I'll be more or less clamped to that bridge!