Hugh the Hedgehog Man

Me with a bit of field vole feeding

Hugh

Fun day out meeting Hugh Warwick, hedgehog-enthusiast and journalist http://www.urchin.info/ and author of the charming book A Prickly Affair: My Life with Hedgehogs. It had been raining all morning and, though I'd told him with supreme confidence we'd be tripping over field signs, when we got to the field we found that all the latrines and most of the feeding stations had been washed away. The place I normally sat to watch for voles was under water.
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So we set up camp on a different, drier stretch, and had barely unfolded the camp stool when a water vole appeared and fed very near us, followed by another ambling further up the bank. I think the rising water levels had actually worked in our favour because the burrows were probably unusable in the short term, forcing the voles up onto the surface.