Shifting Voles

Just when you thought my photos couldn't get any worse. Clicking to enlarge helps, but not much. Still, I was glad to see this chap as it's been a few days now since I've had any sightings, what with the rain. The vegetation's just starting to go over, which helps viewing, but also I've been looking in the wrong spot, I think. This water vole was on the opposite side of the bridge and well away from where the last month's activity's been. They do seem to shift up and down this stretch, or maybe it's different voles.

Training Day

Rosemary finds some feeding

Smashing day in Tilstock training up new water vole surveyors. We spent the morning indoors, with Malcolm and Anne Monie looking at how to spot field signs and ways to map and to record them, plus I did a brief spot on mink rafts.
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Then after lunch we went out to Steel Heath and did some survey work there. Happily we were able to tick off pretty much all the signs we'd been discussing - prints, feeding, trackways, burrows and latrines. There was the usual field/water vole overlap, but much of it was positively water vole.
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Thanks to Clive Dean and Shropshire County Council Countryside Service for organizing the day. Because this course was so over-subscribed, there'll be another training day in the Spring.

Look again!

In an absolute nothing of a ditch, in a field near Grocontinental, water voles are obviously thriving: this despite the rubbish in there, and the fact the ditch doesn't seem to be part of a continuous watercourse. The latrine directly above is fresh (you can tell because of the greenish colour), and the top ones on the slabs of polystyrene show evidence of trampling, which is a territorial behaviour.

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It goes to show how an area can, at a casual glance, look like a filthy hole, but in fact be a really important little environment - in this case a refuge for Britain's most threatened mammal. Council planners, take note!

Voles where I've not seen them before

The bridge over the ditch just before Dobson's (canal) Bridge

Excellent habitat due to good fencing.

Just-about-visible vole.

A nice feeding station, with some droppings towards the bottom edge.

Tell-tale cuts.

If you enlarge the photo above by clicking, you should see several stalks cut off at an angle.

This (above) is what happens if you don't check your rafts regularly enough. I usually go down every 7-14 days - the more often you can look, the better - but with being on holiday I missed a week. The result's a confusion of prints that aren't really readable, though I think I can see some water vole and some brown rat in there.

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Plenty of water vole feeding going on all along the top section; less lower down, towards the marina, but no sign at all of any mink.

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Then, on the way back home I stopped by the stream just before Dobson's Bridge, and saw a vole pretty much straight away. The farmer who owns the field by this brook has helpfully set his fence well back so there's a good margin of unpoached, untouched bank, and it looks to me like a place that's teeming with wildlife.

The famous Cromford Voles

This kerb edging along the canal looks less than ideal, but the water voles simply

burrow around it.

There are burrows all along the top of the bank

Little grebe chick

Moorhen chicks

Drove over to Cromford in Derbyshire today to take a look at the voles who got their own (short) tv show a few years back. There was someone already filming when I got there with what looked like a professional rig, so I just hung back and used extreme zoom, which is possibly why my vole's not entirely in focus. I did get a very good long look, though; this was a juvenile, about the size of a golden hamster.

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It's a really beautiful area. Thanks to Shirl for directions!

Wet, like everything else at the moment

Three voles!

Lots of activity tonight between 8 and 8.15 pm: three voles fighting (or mating) and swimming up and down. It's so hard to get clear photos, though.