The Voles of Roding Valley

I want to share a couple of photos I took during my volunteering recently at Roding Valley Meadows. Roding Valley Meadows is a multiple SSSI reserve in Essex, not far from Epping Forest, and Chigwell, that bastion of Essex culture. It hosts floodplain meadows, a wetland, secondary woodland, a network of ancient hedgerows, and a very dedicated and hard working team of hands-on staff and volunteers. Occasionally I am privileged to join them on their regular work parties.  Kingfishers and Little Egrets are commonplace on the river Roding.  However, a week ago on Tuesday, the day that the sun came back and I saw my first Bumble Bee of the year, it was mainly covered in so many voles.

While we were building some fencing in advance of the arrival of the cattle which provide summer grazing on the open parts of the nature reserve, we accidentally disturbed some of the little furry mammals. It was with some surprise that rather than scattering, although they did run away initially, at least a couple of the voles returned to their grass cutting pile and the round holes in which they seemed to live. Noticing movement, I sat and watched for a little while, as a stubby, furry snout emerged from one of the vole holes. The tiny, round beast sat outside its hole for a moment, looking unperturbed, before finding a few blades of green grass growing from among the pile of cuttings, and beginning to munch on them.  If I moved too close with my camera lens, they would dart back into the hole, sausage-shaped blurs of vole hair, though not for too long. Eventually, my watching began to make them clearly unsettled, and one discovered the tactic of biting off a strip of long grass and retiring with it, into the vole hole. The tip of the grass, protruding, wobbled as the vole munched. I left them to it and got back to work.

 

As I wandered away at the end of a busy day fence building, passing the long hedges of white blackthorn, the first wild blossom of the Spring, I was aware of several voles moving in the leaf litter, seeing another, quite clearly between the blossom covered branches, munching something busily in the leaf litter. I’d heard a rustle and been looking for a small bird as the source of the sound.  A couple of paces on another darted into the long grass. Perhaps at a local scale they are having a good year, they are a species prone to strongly cyclical population dynamics. My observations were entirely unscientific, perhaps I was merely more tuned in to their presence than usual, or perhaps, I just saw a lot of voles that day.   But it struck me how seldom we actually see these creatures. The short tailed field vole is thought to be the only mammal in the British Isles to outnumber humans, yet I was at University before I noticed that I had seen one which wasn’t in a Longworth trap.  They live outside of our radar, though of course many mammals and birds of prey, including Barn Owls and Kestrels, are almost totally dependent on them as a source of food.  It also struck me that they are very beautiful.