Since the walls were wet and slippery, the creature could not get out. Image Bert Heusinkveld While it really did rain rather heavily yesterday morning, the WUR weather station on the Binnenveld reported that it was bone dry. A local drought perhaps? No, says meteorologist Bert Heusinkveld. ‘A vole had gnawed through a cable and made a nice nest for itself under the rain gauge. Apparently, the cable in question was in the way, because it was gnawed all the way through.‘
Judging by the data from the weather station, the vole had been below the gauge for some time. The data drought began last week, on Thursday 27 July at 7 a.m. At that point, the measurement series stopped, as can be seen on the site. Heusinkveld confirms this observation. ‘A colleague commented last Friday that he couldn’t find anything about a minor shower on our site.’
Nest
Heusinkveld was still working at De Veenkampen on the weekend. ‘But at the time, I didn’t think about it at all. Yesterday morning, former colleague Wim van den Berg also alerted us to the missing measurement data. Then my colleague Sjoerd Barten went to have a look and saw a vole under the rain gauge. The little creature had made a nice little nest for itself. And also apparently chewed through a cable.’
Catching the vole turned out to be quite a job. The rain gauge is set up in a pit surrounded by a wall half a metre high. Since the walls were wet and slippery – it was raining hard – the creature could not get out. Heusinkveld thought of a ruse; he took off a boot, and laid it flat on the ground as a hiding place. ‘It worked.’ The researchers went on to repair the material damage.
Isn’t it hilarious that the driest spot the vole could find was under a rain gauge?
Bert Heusinkveld, meteorologist at Meteorology and Air Quality
The scientific damage, on the other hand, is permanent, says Heusinkveld. There is now a five-day gap in the rain series. ‘That is hard to fill in. We measure rainfall every minute. We can still estimate the daily total based on other measurements in the area, but the underlying values are missing. Besides, rain can be very local.’
Heusinkveld does see the humour in the incident. ‘Isn’t it hilarious that the driest spot the vole could find was under a rain gauge? It’s a spot that has to be dry by definition since all the rain is collected above it.’ The vole, incidentally, got away with a scare. After being caught, it was knocked out of the boot, with some effort, into a field.