Mum and Baby

Mum feeding.

Baby feeding (note the darker fur).

Mum and baby together.

Astonishing that not one but two water voles would come up and feed right at my feet. This happens maybe once every couple of years, that you get a particularly bold individual, and in this case her presence is probably encouraging one of her offspring to join in. The population at Edgeley Road seems to be strong this year, and numbers help confidence.

Families

Always a joy to see families interacting. Adult voles are fiercely territorial and will see one another off, but here were two voles feeding happily near each other, the one on the right a juvenile and the one on the left fully-grown. In the fourth picture down, you can see how much darker the juv's coat is - I wonder whether this is to help them blend in better against the muddy bank and so increase their survival rate? Anyway, I suspect the large vole is the smaller one's mother. There are quite a few babies about at the moment,

The Whitchurch Water Voles on tv

You can watch the three-minute clip here: BBC Midlands Today clip

Hello to BBC Midlands Today!

Here's that battle with an apple.

 Possibly the roundest vole I've ever seen.

 Digging furiously. Water voles dig with their paws or their teeth.

If anyone's checking out the blog for the first time, then hello! About a Brook is a public record of water vole activity around Whitchurch which council planners, developers and landowners can use to check the 'vole-quotient' of various sites. It's also a resource bank of images about water voles - latrines and droppings, burrows, paw prints and feeding signs, to help you find voles of your own.

If you know of water voles near you, do always report sightings, as they're a protected species but we cant protect them unless we know they're there.

BBC Midlands Today

 Helen and David from Midlands Today

Two different baby water voles. The lower pic shows a vole with white hairs on its forehead, something I've seen before.

Water voles making use of a discarded gas canister to start a latrine.

With luck, there'll be a little piece on Whitchurch's water voles on Midlands Today airing next Monday. We had a sighting of a White Lion Meadow vole, looked at some feeding from the banks there, then walked up to Edward German Drive to film burrows and a latrine. Later in the day I saw my first baby vole of the year - two, in fact, of exactly the same size so probably from the same litter.

Mossfields, Edward German Drive, and Twitter Friends

 You'll have to click to enlarge the photo - he wasn't stopping!

 Evidence of feeding at Edward German Drive

 Above: droppings and feeding at Edgeley Road.

Below: at Edward German Drive.

 My Twitter friend Pooks, who I met for the first time in real life and by accident!

You meet some really nice people when you're into wildlife, and the chap above is one of them. He'd been passing on water vole sightings to me via Twitter for a while. But I had no idea who he was when I approached him on the bridge by the main town car park and asked him if he'd spotted any interesting wildlife in the stream. 'There are supposed to be water voles here,' he said. I told him he was right, and pointed out a burrow. At which point he turned to me and said: 'Hang on, are you on Twitter?' I said, 'Yes, I'm @volewriter!' And then we knew who we were.

After a good chat he went off towards the wood yard to see if there was any vole activity there, and I went in the opposite direction, looking for field signs that would tell me how the colony was doing further along the brook. But fifteen minutes later he came hurrying up to me to show me some lovely photos he'd got of a water vole behind Tesco's.

Later in the day I went to check on Mossfields (the back of Saddler's Walk), and the voles there look to be doing really well.

Whixall and Greenfields

In the Country Park (Greenfields Nature Reserve). The ripples half way up the stream are probably caused by a water vole.

Water vole droppings in the Country Park

Above, an Edgeley Road vole. Below, one at White Lion Meadow.

Water vole droppings on Whixall Moss.

Whitethroat

Common red damselflies

Raft spider