Vole Patrol is back! We gathered on Tuesday 6th to set up, trying to put traps in exactly the same places as before. We provided free food and bedding for three days (although some were inclined to bring their own bedding, fallen leaves apparently being more desirable than straw). Then we started trapping, visiting at dawn and dusk to see who’d been visiting our traps.
Gunnersbury Triangle had felt a bit of a poor relation in the first round of Vole Patrol. We had a pretty impressive number of wood mice (41), but other sites recorded more exotic species: yellow-necked mouse, bank & field voles and common & pygmy shrews. So imagine our excitement on day one when we found bank voles and a possible juvenile field vole (it’s a bit difficult to tell the difference when they’re small). And we also had wood mice and, annoyingly, quite a lot of large slugs.
Here are some photos of our voles – we’ll be back later in the season with full results.
Feature image “Bank vole at Gunnersbury Triangle” by Jo Hodges licenced under Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International License.