The field vole is a round-faced, fast-paced bobble of a creature, known only to few. Its reclusive life, spent nibbling grass stems in rank grassland, might lead an incautious observer to believe it a creature of peace. It is in no way a creature of peace. More a grassland gangster, the field vole lives and dies by talon and tooth. Fierce fights erupt between voles bickering over grassy tunnels and tussocks — the original turf wars, if you will — and the fizzing fury which accompanies them is audible to young ears. If it were not enough that field voles devote their short, one-year lives to skirmishing and spats, they are also favoured prey of barn owls by night, kestrels by day and weasels at any time. Theirs is a short and violent life.
Field vole, by Margaret Holland
Happily, field voles occur in abundance wherever we give them leave to live, letting the grass grow long and matted enough for a vole to make a hole. If field voles are good at one thing besides bickering, it is making more field voles. A female, if spared a raptor’s strike, can produce four litters of half a dozen young in her short life, and her female offspring themselves can breed from the age of six weeks. In good habitat field vole populations naturally fluctuate, with peaks every four or five years, followed by population collapse, much in the celebrated manner of their Nordic cousins, the lemmings. In spite of these cycles, with a recently estimated UK population of 75,000,000 the field vole is one of just a handful of UK mammals (all of them rodents) whose populations match our own. Though the field vole weighs just 30 grams, can raise 20 young in a year, and requires only long grass in which to live and breed, so complete is our human stranglehold on the British landscape, that we, weighing on average some 70 kilos and demanding incomparably greater resources, rival it in population. Think on that astonishing fact.
Though the field vole is abundant in the right habitat, if you have bumped into a vole it was most likely a bank vole. Its coat is often more reddish, but the bank vole is reliably identified only by its longer tail and more prominent ears. Less obsessively secretive than the field, the bank vole is a regular diurnal visitor to ground beneath bird tables, darting between furtive dunnocks for spilled shards of sunflower seeds. Unlike field voles, which live and breed in above-ground tunnels through dense grass, bank voles generally burrow into the earth.
Also a burrower, to most eyes the tan-brown, white-tummied wood mouse is prettier than both of Norfolk’s small voles. Whereas a vole is rounded, a wood mouse is lean. Its long tail quivers behind it as it moves, while its beady black eyes and large ears, framing a pointed face, give an impression of keen, if nervous, interest. It too is abundant, in gardens, in woods and on any patch of rough ground. Like the bank vole it is a common visitor to bird tables, but unlike the vole it will sometimes scurry up through bushes to feast at the top table meant for the birds. As the wood mouse is largely nocturnal, this happens when chaffinches and blackbirds have gone to roost, so the spoils are left to mice alone.
Wood mice, by Margaret Holland
These are Norfolk’s most abundant native rodents, though their populations are matched, of course, by the long-ago introduced brown rat, that artful and intelligent beneficiary of human messiness. Most of the brown rat population of Norfolk, as it happens, inhabits my shed every winter, where each individual is known as Colin. This stems from a conversation with my grandmother in her declining years which ran as follows. Nick: I have a rat in my shed; I don’t know what to call him. Deaf grandmother (in a shocked and disbelieving voice): Colin?
But I digress. Three more native rodents are found in Norfolk. The charming harvest mouse lives a tight-rope life, slipping through the stems of reed and long grass. The water vole, as its name suggests, lives by river, dyke and pool. And the yellow-necked mouse, a bulky cousin of the wood mouse, while common in much of the UK, is mysteriously rare; perhaps largely confined to the Claylands of South Norfolk. The introduced grey squirrel is abundant, the house mouse is apparently in decline, while the coypu and black rat were both introduced but have disappeared, the former through an eradication campaign in the 1980s.
Leaving us with two native rodents which, post Devension Glaciation, have vanished from Norfolk. The causes of the red squirrel’s decline are only partly understood, as they had dwindled to near nothing long before the grey squirrel appeared. The causes of the European beaver’s decline, however, are starkly clear. We killed them all. Every last one until the beaver was extinct in the UK. What is also clear is that, despite our protestations, beavers are good for landscape, for wildlife and for us. By creating dams along streams and rivers they slow the flow of water and prevent (not cause) flooding. This in turn creates habitat for much other wildlife, including fish, amphibians and dragonflies. The science from everywhere they have returned across Europe is clear: beavers are both economically valuable and good for the landscape. Perhaps what prevents us from embracing them in Norfolk is simply our fear that we might lose a little control over the landscape. We might indeed but, as established above, we control enough of the UK landscape to support close to 70,000,000 70-kilo humans, while forcing a species as light on the earth and naturally prolific as the field vole into only enough habitat to support the same number. Is it not time we made space for a little more wildlife in the landscape of Norfolk and the UK? I for one look forward to the day I can watch beavers in the river behind my house, knowing I am safer from flooding thanks to their presence.
Header image by Terry Whittaker/2020VISION
This article first appeared in EDP Norfolk Magazine in January 2019