Round and about

Feeding and droppings at Brick Kiln Farm

Big latrine in the ditch near Grocontinental

Feeding station at the back of Edward German Drive

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It's been cold, wet and windy for much of this week and I haven't seen any voles at all at White Lion Meadow. However they're still leaving prints in the mud and making their flattened areas of grass, so I know they're there.

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Elsewhere the signs are positive, as shown by the photographs above.

Waiting

I note the New Hythe Birder (see links, "Excellent blog") has already seen a water vole this year, and my friend on the Wild About Britain forum's spotted one too. What with this and Bill Oddie handling a vole on tv this week, plus a wv mention in the BBC Wildlife magazine, I felt all fired up to go looking for myself.
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Did a huge litter pick down at White Lion Meadow - no trolleys in the water, but over two carrier bags' worth of rubbish all over the banks - and looked for prints and latrines while I was there. No luck, or at least, nothing definitely water vole. But I did meet a girl who told me she'd seen one up at the Tesco end a couple of days ago, and it had a brown (non-ratty) tail, so fingers crossed.

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After that I went for a walk at Brick Kiln Farm to see if there were any signs there. As usual there were plenty of field vole feeding stations and droppings, but nothing I could have said for certain was water vole. Then, just as I was about to leave, I found this skull which I'm fairly certain is. The yellow teeth, which water voles use for digging, show this particular animal was an adult.
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Hope I see some live ones in a month or two. It's hard work blogging about invisible voles.

Spot the vole - yes, there is one in the top photo, honest. Two small ones tonight at Brick Kiln Farm, and another larger one at Yockings Gate. You only get flashes, though, not the long close-up views you used to get at White Lion Meadow car park in the town centre, hence the poor-quality photos.

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I include a shot of the waterway at Brick Kiln Farm to show that water voles don't always need sloping soil banks to make burrows. Thick reed beds will also serve for nesting and shelter. Wildlife-friendly farmers will always leave a good margin of uncut vegetation beyond the banks, and avoid using pesticides in the immediate area. With so many predators, voles need all the cover they can get.

Plop!

Nothing makes the same noise entering water as a water vole: fish plunk, frogs spalsh, and rats tend to slip in noiselessly. So when I heard the tell-tale plop near the bank at Brick Kiln Farm today, I was fairly certain I'd just missed a water vole. I think they do it to warn others in the colony, the way a rabbit flashes its tail as it runs away.

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I've finally managed to get some comparative-scale shots of latrines (nice, I know). The top shows water vole, and you can tell it's fresh because of the greenish color, and because it's moist. The middle's water vole again but an older latrine, darker brown and dried out. The third picture down is field vole, and you can see how very much smaller the pellets are. Water vole droppings are a lot like those of guinea pigs actually, for shape and size. I haven't shown rat, but they're pretty much the same except darker and pointy at one end.*

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The bottom shots all show feeding stations; the banks are full of them, they're literally every two or three paces. There must be a very healthy population of voles along this waterway**. However, it's becoming clear to me how tricky it is to spot 'wild' water voles, and how spoilt we were to have the semi-tame ones near Tesco in the town centre, where everyone could see them, close up, at almost any time of the day. I've been looking all week at Yocking's Gate and the Country Park and had no more sightings, though I'm sure the reed beds are full of voles. I have, however, seen a fox, a buzzard and some more otter spraint, and it's just nice to get out of an evening and consider the water.

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*If as a naturalist you go getting down and dirty by river banks, you should obviously be washing your hands very carefully afterwards. But you also need to take care with eating and drinking while you're on the spot. Rat wee carries a nasty disease and can be present in the water, so a sterile wipe is a handy thing to carry if you fancy stopping mid-survey for a snack or drink.

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**I should stress that the area of Brick Kiln Farm I go watching in is private land, but I have permission to go on there.

The field vole problem

On Sunday the vole group went to a local farm where the landowners have fenced off an area of marshy field, with the specific aim of helping wildlife. We need more farmers like this! Fencing off the ground stops cattle from destroying banks and vegetation. It's especially useful along ths margins of ponds, streams and rivers. In this particular strip there's a large section of glyceria reed (top photo) which water voles love.

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As soon as we began to look for field signs, we found them: latrines, feeding stations and trackways were every few yards, plus a few burrows. However, we did run into a problem we hadn't anticipated last year, that of the similarity of field vole signs to those of water voles. Field voles also cut grass etc at a 45 degree angle; they also make little piles of chopped vegetation; they also form trackways through the grass. In the picture above, it's a water vole feeding station on the left, and a field vole one on the right.
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Not always easy to tell them apart, but there are some indicators. Firstly, water vole stuff tends to be on a slightly larger scale. Their trackways are more rat-sized, as opposed to mouse-sized, they chop their food into slightly longer pieces, and their droppings are bigger and darker. Secondly, water voles tend not to put droppings on top of their food piles. (Why would field voles do this??? But they do. Teeny green ones.) And thirdly, the location's a bit of an indicator. A trackway leading straight into the water is going to be water vole.