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Plan to track for signs of endangered water vole

Charlie Stubbsin Church Stretton
News imageCharlie Stubbs / BBC There is a man with short brown hair. He has stubbly facial hair and a slight smile. He is wearing a black coat, a green jacket and a brown t-shirt. Behind him is a big green meadow, with a row of houses behind him, Charlie Stubbs / BBC
Stuart Edmunds came up with the prototype for the conservation boxes

Self-made monitoring boxes are being used to track the declining numbers of water voles in Shropshire.

The number of water voles nationally are in free fall, with more than 90 per cent of them lost since the 1970s, the Mammal Society said.

To combat this, the Shropshire Mammal Group has been tracking the endangered species using the boxes, funded by a £1,500 grant from Shropshire Hills National Landscape. The group say it will help measure whether numbers are similar in the county when compared to the rest of the UK.

The water vole is often described as an "ecosystem engineer" or a "mini-beaver" by conservationists, as they dig burrows through watercourses and help aerate the soil.

The species was "already having a rough time of it" because of climate change, the chair of the Shropshire Mammal group Stuart Edmunds said.

He added the "loss of habitat" will eventually "make them homeless".

"These are specialist species which really need reed beds, long grassy habitats and areas like peat bog and marsh," he added.

"They are all habitats that have been massively depleted so the only way that we are going to that reverse is to improve the habitat and create more of it."

News imageCharlie Stubbs / BBC There is a dark green wooden box with a black lid. This is hidden is long spikey grassland. It is overgrown.Charlie Stubbs / BBC
The £1500 in funding will build eight monitoring boxes fitted with a trap camera

The plan was to build eight boxes - four in Cudwell Meadow, Church Stretton, and four on the Long Mynd in south Shropshire, the group said.

"Once I have showed they are productive and they are a good effective means of getting mammal data, we can then look for more grants to try and raise a bit more money," Edmunds said.

"Traditionally, it would be quite quite hard work [to get the data] as we would have to go out with groups of people looking for the field signs like their poo.

"It's quite difficult to find a little tiny poo that's the size of a tic-tac hidden in really thick vegetation."

He said the "long-term aim over the next five years" is to work out where water voles are in the county, and work on protecting their habitats.

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