Back in Business

Not a great photograph, but clear enough!

One or two droppings is all it takes to prove water vole presence at the back of Waylands Road (below)

Latrine on the brick under the railway bridge near Homebase. This shows that Debbie's voles are back.

Rat at White Lion Meadow, unfortunately - has been reported to the council. No sightings of water voles here as yet but they're definitely about on this site because every day there are fresh starry prints in the mud.

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Just to add: was lucky enough a few days ago to see a water shrew in the field off Edgeley Road. Now they can move fast.

The re-fit went well, then.

Took all these today and forwarded them to the Environment Agency. The top three trolleys are in the brook at White Lion Meadow, while the other nine are in the short stretch at the back of Waylands Road, which is also an established site for water voles (I took photos of voles and field signs there at the start of this year; you can see them on this blog). As far as I can tell, every single one of these trolleys is Tesco's - this despite there being four other supermarkets in Whitchurch. The difference is, of course, that the other supermarkets use the coin-release system.

Strange prints

Took this picture of a water vole latrine (middle) in the section of the brook near Waymills. But there seems to be some sort of a footprint next to it that reminded me of two other photos I took near there a few months ago (top and bottom). Does anyone know what might have left that mark? There are water vole prints in the top pic, for scale.

Waymills

This is one of the areas due for bank maintenance this week. The local resident pictured above asks the council men to go carefully.

Waymills again

Had a walk up Waymills again and was amazed to see prints all the way along. The latrine immediately left is near the culvert just before Station Road; the prints above that are under the bridge by what was the playground; and the prints by the brick pipe outlet are opposite Waylands Close - so there's evidence of water voles the entire length of that section of the Staggs Brook. After this there's a gap, no field signs at all where the brook goes along the back of Edward German Drive at the moment. Then another cluster by Tesco.

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We've seen this pattern before, though; you can have lots of water vole activity on one side of a bridge, and none at all on the other side, twenty yards away. But vole colonies move about and stretch and shrink as populations peak and fall, so an absence of signs in one patch doesn't mean anything other than there aren't obviously voles around that spot at the moment. It'll be interesting to look again towards the end of the summer and see where they've spread.

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Trolleys are unfortunately a problem even in this part of town, so far away from Tesco.

Waymills

I went for a walk round the back of the estate this afternoon and looked at that stretch of the brook. In the section where I saw a vole last year there were a lot of burrows, but no other obvious signs; then again, it had been pouring down most of the day, so footprints and latrines would have been washed away.

It's a beautiful area, teeming with wildife. While I was walking I saw a charm of goldfinches, some long-tailed tits and a tree creeper. Oh, and that ubiquitous beast, a Tesco trolley.