Header image: A water vole pictured at home in Slimbridge
Planning, patience and sheer good luck may give you a sighting of the impossibly cute hero of Wind in the Willows, a roly-poly, furry, inelegant swimmer, doggy-paddling like a trainee beaver. When author Kenneth Grahame wrote about the adventures of Ratty (a water vole despite the name), these rodents were ubiquitous throughout the UK. After the middle of the last century, when there were an estimated eight million, a catastrophic decline saw numbers crash to approximately 130,000.
How did this happen?
WWT's Callum Moore says: “With urbanisation and intensive agriculture over the past few decades, water voles have lost a lot of habitat.” Even worse, the introduction of the invasive American mink decimated their population, which fell by up to 90% from 1989 to 1998.
How do we halt the decline?
Conservation organisations want to create more habitat for water voles, including planting reedbeds. And with mink numbers on the decline, habitat restoration can now really deliver for water voles. WWT’s own target of creating and restoring 100,000 hectares of wetland by 2050 will give a huge boost.
How will water voles spread to places from which they have been lost?
Callum says: “It’s best to let water voles recolonise areas naturally, but where this isn’t possible there will be reintroduction programmes.” The London Water Vole Recovery Project is just one such effort set up to bring back the species to the capital.
Today, water voles have a chance to rebuild their numbers across many of our sites. As vegetation dies back, now is the time to look for them. Learn more about water voles at wwt.org.uk/water-vole
Telling signs
How to spot a water vole
Tidy eaters
Water voles bite through grass, reeds, sedge stems and twigs as if making an old-fashioned pen nib. They always snip cleanly at a 45-degree angle and, very tidily, leave neat piles of around 10cm cut sections on their pathways.
Piles of poo
Vole latrines consist of a close scatter of cylindrical, blunt-ended pellets about 1cm long. The texture of putty when fresh, they may be anything from brown to green and they are odourless. Unlike water vole droppings, rat poo tapers to a point at one or both ends.
Vole holes
Burrows show as a series of holes along the bank at the water’s edge, just above the water level, each one a little wider than it is high. Others on steep banks may be underwater, serving as boltholes.
