One more thing about voles. They are a very common prey of Great Blue Herons in the Pacific Northwest. Any time you see a heron out in a field, it is probably looking for voles. I have frequently seen them catching them in the fields at Ridgefield NWR, for example, and near Boundary Bay, BC. West of the Cascades, they are surely Townsend's Voles. East of the Cascades (for example, around Ellensburg, where there are often herons out in the fields along with all the hawks), they would be another species, probably Montane Voles.
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Dennis Paulson
1724 NE 98 St.
Seattle, WA 98115
206-528-1382
dennispaulson at comcast.net



On Mar 28, 2010, at 9:53 PM, Kristin Stewart wrote:

> Two or three years ago, I met Rachel Lawson and Rebecca Evans at Nisqually NWR. We were wandering along on the trail to McAlister Creek, and watched a Great Blue Heron catch a vole. We all thought it was a very LARGE vole, and the GBH spent ever so much time trying to manipulate, or mandipulate the vole into position to swallow it. It took quite a long time, perhaps more than 5 minutes. It finally got the vole in a position to swallow it, the poor vole kicking all the way, and we all thought that would be enough food for some time for this GBH. What did we know? Not much apparently, as the same GBH proceeded to catch yet another quite chubby vole about 2 minutes later and 10 feet further along the way. My very first sighting of a GBH prey catching episode was about 25 years ago also at Nisqually NWR, when I saw a GBH catch what I thought at the time was a mouse, but now suspect was a vole, which it proceeded to dunk into the water before attempting to swallow it. Isn?t Nisqually a great place?
>
> Kristin Stewart




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