The RSPB's Big Garden Birdwatch

Very pleased to read this nice letter in BBC Wildlife Magazine about my water vole article in November's issue.

Also delighted to be interviewed for the RSPB's Big Garden Birdwatch podcast. Click to hear me talk about why teenagers and wildlife are a great mix.

EarthLines magazine

There's a lovely feature in this gorgeous environmental magazine based on Hugh Wawick's book, The Beauty in the Beast.

The piece talks about how certain animals ignite a passion for nature, and as with the book, I'm listed for my vole-obsession. Hugh kindly calls About A Brook "one of the most exciting blogs on the internet" - despite its very niche remit! He also recounts the story of how my interest in water voles first came about: that as an 8 year old on holiday with my parents, we spotted a water vole as we crossed a bridge between a car park and a shopping centre. We watched the animal for five minutes, then my mother said we had to go. I flat-refused, and in the end they went off and left me for half an hour to ogle this vole. It really was love at first sight.

EarthLines magazine itself is gorgeous and I can't help thinking a subscription would make a brilliant gift for any wildlife enthusiast. Check it out here: http://www.earthlines.org.uk/

To read more of Hugh's work, you can visit his own hedgehog blog here: http://www.urchin.info/

Sighting already!

Photo of a diving vole from 2011

I was on the main town car park by Tesco when I glanced into the Staggsbrook and saw a chunky rodent swimming upstream. At first I thought it was probably a rat, but as I stood and watched, it suddenly dived out of sight which is typical water vole behaviour. I also think a rat would tend to swim across water to make the shortest journey rather than along the water course, and run out onto the bank to escape rather than dive below the surface.

I know there are voles about here because two posts back I photographed their prints. So this is a first for me because I have never seen a water vole as early as January before!

And into 2013 with signs already

What we have here is pretty much the full set of main field signs for water voles: feeding, prints, active burrows and droppings. The droppings are the most important as they're fairly definitive - burrows and prints can be confused with rats', and sometimes field vole feeding looks like water vole. But in the top photo this is definitely w-v because of the scale.

All these I found in the field off Edgeley Road, a colony I'd been dreading visiting because of the flooding. What was clear was that low-sided stretches of the brook here had been swamped and deserted by voles - there was just nowhere for them to go as the levels rose - but other stretches with higher sides looked to have survived OK. Upsetting to find some contamination by diesel to add to the disruption, but it didn't seem to have spread too far.

This is a really soggy field, like a big sponge that soaks up a lot of water during heavy rain. Lord help us if the council ever decide to build on it, because wherever will this water go?

Traffic

A peep under the bridge at White Lion Meadow (the main town car park by Tesco) reveals a lot of rodent activity under the bridge. There are certainly rat prints here, and mouse, but I'm moderately confident that some of these are water vole because of their starry shape. The two pawprints directly under the twig in the centre of the second photo look likely, for example.

The banks on this stretch of the brook are deep enough to keep the voles safe even if the water level rises a few feet, as long as they stay in their burrows and don't try to swim in the strong current.

Happy Christmas to Volers Everywhere

We're in the dead zone now as regards vole-watching. I don't expect to see much in the way of field signs till February, and no actual sightings of animals till the end of that month or even March/April. I worry, too, about the amount of rain that's come down lately, in case some of the burrows have been compromised and the voles made vulnerable.

However, we've had very wet winters before and the colonies always do seem to come back, so I'm just crossing my fingers as usual and counting the days till the spring. We're not too far away now.

In the meantime, let me direct you to Terry Whittaker's gorgeous blog, and remind you that his water vole photography workshops will be running in 2013.
http://terrywhittakerphoto.blogspot.co.uk/2012/12/water-vole-workshops-2012.html

The Field Studies Council

Common shrew jawbones. The enamel at the very tips of the teeth is red.

Badger hair: white at the tip, ridged when you roll it between your fingers.

Weighing one of the mammals we trapped. 

The Longworth traps are opened inside a bag so the animal doesn't leap away and escape.

Shrew in motion.

I think, going by tail length, we decided this was a pygmy shrew.

Bank vole.

Wood mouse. Scruffing small rodents is the best way to hold them; picking up a wood mouse by its tail can cause the skin to shear away painfully and permanently.

I was lucky enough to attend a Field Studies Centre course this autumn on mammal identification. The FSC run training courses for both amateur and professional ecologists, and cover a wide range of wildlife topics across their various schools: http://www.field-studies-council.org/ My course was at Preston Montford in Shropshire.

We were taught to prepare and set small-mammal traps, the correct way to check them and the proper way to handle and record the wild rodents we caught. We were also shown how to clean the traps after use. We looked at animal prints, nests, skin markings, scat, skulls and feeding signs, and listened to some common mammal calls. We looked at recording and reporting methods; we dissected owl pellets. At the end of the three-day residential course, students were invited to take an exam in Mammal Identification.

I'm delighted to say my certificate came this week and I got a Distinction, with 60 marks out of a maximum 64. So I'm very pleased because I enjoyed the course so much. Now I'm off to join the Mammal Society!  http://www.mammal.org.uk/