Yellow Neck Mice

I spent a little time in our hedgerow the other morning, before we were open to the public, and was hoping to get some photographs of our field voles... the problem was the time of day and bad reflections on the glass. It made it very difficult, so I decided to move on to our yellow neck mice and wood mice in the more shaded part of the hedgerow, and where the reflections were more manageable.

These two mice are vey difficult to tell apart just by looking at them, the yellow necked mice do tend to be a little bigger, but from a visual point of view the big difference is their yellow band across the neck... hence their name. I was hoping to get a photograph of both types showing their neck, but only kind of managed with the yellow necked. In fact only one of the photos below is of a wood mouse.

This is the wood mouse. You may be able to see a couple of slight differences, but really it is the size and neck... neither of which you can see from this photo... which shows you it is a wood mouse rather than a yellow neck mouse.

And a couple of field voles that stopped for a second to see what was going on. I will have to try again at a different time of day with these.

Thanks for looking :-)