Food chain

The kind of bird that would dispatch a water vole no bother. Luckily this sparrowhawk was in my back garden, not the supermarket car park. An urban setting can be good for voles because it cuts down the number of predators.

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I include the middle photo because it shows clearly the hind feet that make the distinctive starry prints. (Click for a larger view.)

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.

Nesting

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You are invited

Vole love

Two voles this evening, doing a courtship routine which consisted of repeated chasing, coupling and ignoring each other.

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Malcolm Monie's had an email from Mr Sturton at NSDC letting us know of work next week to the banks further up from this section, but reassuring us it would be sympathetic. The men have been given instructions to cut to a height of 6 inches so as to leave some food and cover for the water voles. No herbicide to be used this year and they have been told to leave a wider margin along the brook at Edward German Drive when mowing the grass. So that's a good example of 'joined up thinking' when it comes to environmental maintenance.

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Had a walk down Whixall Moss and saw sporadic evidence of feeding and a couple of burrows near the car park. There are plenty of ditches all round the Moss, but unfortunately most of them are pretty choked up.

This is a vole John Harding saw on the 21st, and I've just spent a happy half hour watching another (and there may have been a second one further up the bank because there was a lot of disturbance under the water by the bank). I managed to litter pick all round the vole, who was feeding on dock, grass and young nettles. At one point a boy ran across the bridge making a terrific clatter, and again the vole didn't show any reaction; shortly afterwards a group of teenage girls came past and admired it, and asked about voles in general. Throughout the conversation we had, which was shouted across the brook, the little animal continued to feed without concern.

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I was able to get very close and see how dextrously it used its front paws to pluck and hold vegetation. The general shape of a water vole - the big bottom, the blunt nose - always reminds me of a guinea pig, but those nimble front paws are more like a hamster's.

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At one point a rat came across the bank and seemed to be stalking the vole, but as soon as the vole became aware, it dropped into the water and vanished. The rat moved on. I'm wondering how much of a threat brown rats are?

A Less Charming View

That's five trolleys you can see in this short stretch. Mid-April some sort of decision's going to be made by Tesco central re coin-release trolleys for Whitchurch. I'd have thought it was a no-brainer. The money and time that's wasted pulling trolleys out, the cost of replacing stolen ones, the less tangible but nevertheless hugely important cost in community relations, environmental message and store profile - can there be any other answer?