Free-D

Poor old Silvia Clemente, it seems to be out of the frying pan and into the fire. After being at the centre of several stormy teacups concerning the archives (yawn) and more recently, the International Arts Festival, she now finds herself dealing with a plague of field voles. I feel kind of well informed on this subject because when I was thirteen I did a project on water voles and was highly recommended for my efforts. Of course, the field vole is rather different. Now there are two types of voles, the common vole (paradoxically not found in Britain) and the field vole.

Grassy habitats

They live in mainly open, grassy habitats with dense ground cover. It particularly likes overgrown fields with damp tussocky grass… and of course therein lies part of the problem, the wet weather means that they’ve bred like…er…rabbits. They forge overground runways with groups of females making nests and the males tending to play the field (literally) mating with several female groups. In fact they’re pretty efficient mating machines: they are up for it throughout the spring and summer, with four to six young born at a time, weaned up to sixteen days and ready to procreate themselves at just six weeks! It’s little wonder then that plagues occasionally occur. Fortunately once they have a population explosion they become extremely aggressive (with each other) and breed less successfully. I have a suspicion – and this could get me into trouble – that the plague that’s hit the headlines in recent weeks has done less to endanger either crops or our health than to fill the pages of the local press and give the farmers yet another thing to gripe about. The fact is that they are not normally pests and the claim that they carry with them tulremia is vastly exagerrated. Tularemia - also known as rabbit fever - comes from one of the most infectious known bacteria. Before antibiotics, the disease had a relatively high fatality rate. I was severely admonished for making suggestions to terrorists in a previous article, so I hesitate to say it, but the bacteria is also recognised as a potential bioweapon of choice for terrorists because of its infectious qualities and the fact that it has low lethality (therefore not endangering the lives of its users).

I don’t know what it is about the rodent that engenders such fear and loathing in people – perhaps the bubonic plague had a long-lasting effect on our collective consciousness. Recently the photos of thousands of drowned voles in irrigation canals has brought that latent fear to the surface. There is talk of hundreds of thousands of acres at risk and, more terrifying still, of the flies and ticks that will emerge from the rodents’ rotting corpses.

   Compensations

Farmers are demanding compensation and permission to use anticoagulants, clorophacinone and bromodiolone, not harmless in themselves, but apparently the lesser of two evils. Every cloud as they say: voles are the favourite delicacy of barn owls, kestrels, foxes, snakes and even wild boar, so while the farmers are seething the local fauna must be having a feast.