Signs of hope for endangered water voles
WATER voles are the UK’s fastest declining mammal, having seen their numbers dropping by 94 per cent since the 1970’s, but could they still be hanging on in Bolton?
It’s one of the hottest days of the year and myself and three other intrepid Wildlife Trust staff are crawling around on our hands and knees in the middle of a peat bog that lies just next to Bolton’s Macron stadium. Why, you might ask? Because we are looking for signs of the elusive water vole.
Best known as Ratty from the Wind in the Willows (Ratty is actually a water vole, not a common or garden rat), these lovely little mammals are in trouble.
Habitat loss and predation from the invasive American mink, many of which escaped from old fur farms, has seen the water vole become seriously endangered and placed on both the Great Britain and the England Red List for Mammals.
Water voles live along the edge of rivers, streams and ditches, building their burrows along the side and top of the banks, sometimes surrounded by grazed ‘lawns’ where they have popped out for a quick feed.
They also create little feeding stations of piles of neatly cut and stacked grass, and pile their poo up in tidy little latrines.
So, these were all of the signs that we were looking for, whilst undertaking one of a series of water vole surveys on Red Moss, one of Bolton’s last surviving lowland raised peat bogs.
Unfortunately, any long range hopes of actually seeing a water vole itself were dashed when our survey leader exclaimed, “See one! We had a dedicated water vole officer for two years who never even saw one!” (but who did work very hard in protecting and creating habitats for them).
However, we were rewarded with some signs of their presence.
A couple of burrows we identified and their position carefully marked and recorded.
We also discovered several feeding stations, marvelling at the neatly laid out piles of grass which had all been cut to almost exactly the same length, just ready for the water vole families to pop back for a snack when they next got peckish.
Even though it was a long, hot day and we all ended up with soggy feet and covered in mud, the reward of knowing that our conservation efforts at Red Moss were working and there was one more stronghold for one of our most charming (in my view at least) mammals, was absolutely worth it.
Back in the 1990’s Red Moss was nearly destroyed and turned into a landfill site and it was only campaigning by the Wildlife Trust and a judicious change in local government that saved it.
This just goes to show how fragile so many of our wild spaces and the wildlife that relies on them are.
So, let’s value nature, value messy, value our vital green lungs – and even the time spent crawling around in them searching for tiny piles of water vole poo!