Tracking ratty: Week 9 of the Water Vole Displacement Project

This week we continued to radio track voles to determine mortality, and their movements continued much the same. We lost one vole at one site: we were completely unable to find the collar signal at all, and are unsure whether the loss was caused by predation or simply a faulty collar.

Once we had finished our last radio tracking session, we pre-baited sites ready for re-trapping next week. We place the traps in approximately the same places as in the original trapping sessions, bait them with some apple and pin the doors open so that voles can get used to moving in and out of the traps before we set them properly next week.

We have also placed a camera trap at a couple of the sites for personal interest. We haven’t had much luck capturing water voles, but this stoat appeared beside some of our regularly used vole burrows.

[video width="1280" height="720" mp4="http://www.mammal.org.uk/wp-content/uploads/2016/10/Stoat-cam-trap.mp4"][/video]

Next week we will be starting to re-trap our voles to remove radio collars, so will be posting many more  vole pictures!

Charlotte and Emily

For more information on this project or to donate to this work, visit our Appeal page or the WildCRU website. You can also keep up to date with this project on Facebook and Twitter. And for more cute pictures of water voles, visit Andrew Harrington’s website http://u0000vs933onpn8m.photoshelter.com/gallery/The-dark-water/G0000KcrP4sU1uGs/