UK Recruits Mink in Conservation Effort

UK Recruits Mink in Conservation Effort
AUGUST 2, 1998: By exploiting the fear which the American mink engenders in its prey, British conservationists hope to save an indigenous rodent from extinction, reports today’s Sunday Telegraph.
Britain’s population of American mink, descended from animals that were released or escaped into the wild, have played a major role – along with habitat loss – in decimating the country’s population of water voles (Arvicola terrestris).
Now conservationists hope to take advantage of this prey-predator relationship by using mink droppings to warn voles away from danger areas.
The new strategy comes in response to legislation introduced this April which criminalises the intentional causing of damage to a water vole’s habitat. “Now developers working on river banks and water-side projects have had to take water voles into account,” reports the Telegraph. “But instead of trapping voles and moving them while development work is under way, researchers have hit upon an alternative to persuade them to move on.”
The plan is to scatter mink droppings and urine around voles’ burrows at a secret site in central England where the new legislation has held up development. “It is hoped that such signs will encourage the voles to move further downstream, away from evidence of their dreaded enemy,” says the Telegraph.
According to the Telegraph, Britain’s vole population in the late 1980s was estimated to have fallen by two-thirds since the turn of the century, and now “the situation is believed to be even more perilious.”
Also being recruited in the conservation drive is the British public’s empathy for the most celebrated water vole of all, Ratty, in Wind in the Willows.
“It would be so sad if it became only a fictitious character in a book and not a real-life creature on the river bank,” said Rod Strachan, a researcher for the Wildlife Conservation Unit at Oxford University, to the Telegraph.
-
For further information contact Fur Commission USA.
Home
© 1998-2011 Fur Commission USA