Squelching through the mud, peering carefully beneath the hanging branches of rush, searching for signs of water vole, I was reminded of William Boot's line "Feather-footed through the plashy fens passes the questing vole . . ." in Evelyn Waugh's Scoop. This probably wasn't fen, but it was definitely plashy - marshy pools all over the place. So were signs of vole, although in this case they were bank voles. There were little piles of cut vegetation, chopped off by sharp incisor teeth, and bundles of white pith, the inside of soft rush stems, the green outer cuticle neatly stripped and eaten. Here and there were latrines and surface tunnels through the vegetation where these particular questing voles had passed.
Close by a drystone wall, a rustle of movement beneath a bramble patch caught my attention. Two bank voles, flanks a rich red brown in the sunlight, were chasing round the barbed strands of blackberry, before disappearing into a gap between the stones of the wall.
Down by the water's edge, I looked in vain for water-vole clues. Each collection of feeding remains turned out to be those of bank voles and not their larger relatives. There were no territory-marking latrines, scent-marked by a feather-footed female paddling secretions rubbed from her flanks. Wading knee-deep through the water, I parted fresh shoots of meadowsweet and greater willowherb, looking for the telltale signs of water vole occupation. Each stand of branched burr-reed and flag iris was searched, but to no avail.
Turning to the adjacent wetland, I hopped over the stile, and two startled young rabbits burst from beneath the overhanging refuge of soft rush. Once again I rummaged around, finding only bank-vole runs and molehills.
My survey is the second phase of work commissioned by West Yorkshire Ecology, based in Leeds and covering the former metropolitan county council area. To get a clear picture of where water voles are and are not, all watercourses and other potential sites need to be surveyed, which will mean a lot of nil returns. Such is, however, the lot of the vole-questing naturalist.
