Water vole release with Ben Casey

More than 100 water voles have been released at Nene Wetlands

Transcript

00:00Today we are at the Nen Wetlands, currently out on Dragonfly Lake, releasing approximately 116 water voles into the landscape.

00:08This is a project that we've been working on for several years now.

00:11It is a project which we've done in collaboration with Stannock Lakes, as well as Natural England Species Recovery Project Fund,

00:18which has provided us with the money for this particular project.

00:22We've had a whole host of volunteers join us, helping unload the voles, get them into their release pens,

00:28and at the moment now we're taking them across to a ring ditch which connects all the way around our site,

00:36and also connects up to Stannock Lakes too.

00:39So we'll be placing the release pens out onto the ditch where they've got surplus habitat,

00:45more than enough vegetation to get stuck into, and over the next week we'll gently soft release them into the landscape.

00:52That will be when the release pens will be removed and the voles will be let out into the wild,

00:57which is exactly what we're wanting to achieve with this project.

01:01So water voles were once a very predominant part of our landscape, but have quickly become the fastest declining mammal within the UK.

01:09Water voles are struggling to catch up with the lack of connectivity between habitats.

01:15Through restoring the landscape and connecting more habitats,

01:19we are able to do more of these reintroduction projects and hopefully we can bring water voles back to the UK in strong populations.

01:26So of course as well as the water vole reintroduction project, we've of course got the beaver reintroduction project,

01:31which we're working on currently.

01:33Our fence is almost nearing completion, we have a couple of weeks work left on that,

01:38and then we'll be ready to release beavers as well.

01:40So hopefully within the next year or two, we'll have a situation where beavers and water voles will coexist in the same area,

01:47which would be absolutely fantastic and a first for this site in a very, very long time.