Toads

Water vole-feeding

Comma butterfly

Stonechats

Voles, Hedgehogs and Toads

Toads at the Winding Hole, Whitchurch canal

A short voley reprise: fur is brown, nose is blunt, feet dark, ears small and tucked-in, tail brown and hairy, and (if you can get a glimpse of them) the front teeth are orange.

Getting Colder

GCN at Brown Moss

Brown Moss Toad

Not sure how many more nights of voling there are left in the year. It's getting pretty cold to sit still on the bank with my camera for any length of time.

Water Voles back at Yockings Gate

Juvenile vole, from the field off Edgeley Road.

Guinea-pig sized female.

Yockings Gate baby frog.

Yockings gate baby toad.

I haven't had a sighting at Yockings Gate since 2007, so it was a pleasant surprise to wander up there last night and see certainly one water vole, possibly two, on either side of the bridge by the farm. You'd struggle to get a decent photo as the vegetation's now extremely lush, but that's great for the voles. As I arrived, two swans were sailing up the central channel, and I know a baby water vole makes a good snack for a swan. So the more places the voles have to hide, the better. Everything eats voles.

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This site's suffered in recent years from over-zealous dredging and from persons unknown dumping tubs of chemical waste into the water. I hope now the area's left to settle and the vole colony to really establish.

Nicky and her Enormous Vole

A massive vole Nicky once rescued from a cat.

A female great crested newt that lives in the cellar. Nicky has a licence to handle them.

A toad, also from the cellar.

Mating toads, and spawn in the pond.

Toad spawn.

Prints along the banks at Waylands Road, where a council workman told me he'd seen a water vole this morning.
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I was lucky enough to get a look round Nicky Hunter's lovely wildlife garden at Whixall. Really I was looking for water vole signs and we did find some likely burrows, though the search was pretty much academic since Nicky sees them regularly swimming across her pond. There's a good population of field voles, and also various amphibians - see above. A nature-lover's paradise, basically!