A great tit - spotted beneath a garden table (From The Bolton News)

A great tit - spotted beneath a garden table

Narrow escape for a short-tailed field vole Wonderful

places to

watch the

wildlife... MID-February and the rain turned first to sleet, and then to heavy hail, as I made my way up to Winter Hill in search of a winter birdwatch. To begin with, my first 20 minutes turned out to be more of a mammal watch.

I was watching a hovering kestrel, when suddenly the bird dropped like a stone into the grass. It emerged carrying a mammal, but almost immediately it was attacked by a crow. The kestrel dropped its prey and hurried away.

I searched the ground and there I found a short tailed field vole, alive, but only just. A number of years ago I watched a similar event and the vole was taken to a friend of mine who breeds hamsters.

Thanking my lucky stars (for once), I had a mobile phone in my car, and I had soon made arrangements to have the victim treated. Within a couple of hours the vole was eating in its 'hospital cage', and by the time you read these notes, the vole will have been returned to the place where I found it. Let us hope it watches kestrels more closely in future.

My second interesting observation was of a great tit feeding beneath a garden bird table. I have read a recent scientific paper pointing out that it may now be possible to tell the difference between male and female great tits. Both have a prominent black line down the front of the body, starting from the white collar and going down to the thighs. It is now thought that the black line of the male continues by running down each thigh, while that of the female seems to end just before reaching the thigh.

I would be interested to hear what BEN readers think of this theory. This is the time of the year to test the theory. Now Valentines Day has come and gone birds do seem to begin serious courtship. It is thus possible to watch the two sexes of great tits together.

The cold unpleasant weather has turned up some unusual birds this week, including red grouse, peregrine, short eared owl and merlin on Winter Hill, and Berwick swan, water rail and little owls around Belmont.

North West Water are very conservation-minded and areas around reservoirs are now wonderful places to watch wildlife. We should never be afraid of giving credit to industry when it is benefiting the environment.

Converted for the new archive on 14 July 2000. Some images and formatting may have been lost in the conversion.