In the UK, the American mink is an invasive species. They were brought to the UK for fur farms in the last century. Thousands of them escaped and are now established in the countryside.
They threaten some of UK’s native species including the water vole which was immortalised as Ratty in Kenneth Grahame’s The Wind in the Willows. It is facing extinction at the hands of this invasive species.
Numbers of fallen by 90% over the past 40 years. There is an ongoing programme to eradicate the American mink from the UK. A massive task made a little easier with a novel and effective approach to trapping which has been successful in eradicating the American mink from two UK counties: Norfolk and Suffolk.
The culling team is made up of a small group of conservationists and volunteers from the Waterlife Recovery Trust. And according to the report by The Times, of yesterday, “The key weapon is smart traps: floating cages laced with mink sent that send a text and email when they are sprung.”
This removes the need for daily checks as the volunteers are notified when they’ve caught an American mink. This reduced the number of trap visits required by 98%. This in turn enabled the volunteers to cover a very large but core area of 5852 km² which is almost 3% of England with 441 smart traps.
This was a trial and it’s been declared a success because the team has found no evidence of American mink reproduction within this core area. And that covers the breeding season for 2023.
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As a result, water voles are returning to the areas where they’ve been missing for decades. Due to this success, the programme will be extended across Britain.
The Emeritus Professor of animal conservation at the University of Dundee, Tony Martin, is the team leader under the Water Live Recovery East, a partnership between conservationists, water management companies and charities.
He had believed that the mink would be difficult to eradicate and he said that he was “flabbergasted” at the success of the project, an accomplishment made possible for less than £500,000. The cost is considered great value bearing in mind that two counties have been cleared of American mink.
He added that, “Until now, the complete removal of American mink from Britain has been an impossible dream, but the success of this trial offers hope that a century of catastrophic damage to precious native wildlife can be brought to an end.”
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The country with the greatest concern about the damage done by non-native species is Australia. They been particularly concerned about feral cats on the continent for many years. Sadly, it seems, that when a country needs to protect native species from non-native species the only way to achieve that is to kill the non-native species and in the case of Australia, they kill feral cats in very large numbers in any way possible including cruel ways such as mass poisonings and shooting.
In a way, the non-native species are victims as well. The problem that they cause is always down to human behaviour. They are non-native because people brought them from one country where they are native to another where they are invasive
