Let’s work together, be ambitious and say goodbye to American mink

Let’s work together, be ambitious and say goodbye to American mink - Waterlife Recovery Trust

a person in a river in waders with a mink raft floating in front of them — A volunteer setting up a smart trap Credit Waterlife Recovery Trust

A problem with invasive introduced species is that they leave you few choices: you suffer the damage, you control them, or you eradicate them. In most cases these are not exclusive, you might for example do some control but still suffer damage. Without eradication, the cost of damage and control remains year in, year out. This should lead inexorably to thinking in every case – ‘is eradication possible for this species?’. Not, is it difficult and challenging, which most significant eradication projects will be, but is it possible? Given the very significant damage that introduced species can cause, and the decidedly unattractive option of damage and control for ever, it is time to get ambitious with eradication.

In East Anglia, significant ambition, backed by science might just be the beginning of the end for introduced American mink. Building on county-based control programmes, partners with an interest in reversing the huge decline in water voles (>90%) came together and set up Waterlife Recovery East. With the help of a Green Recovery Challenge Fund grant and support from partners such as Anglian Water, the IDBs and the Environment Agency, we set about removing mink from Norfolk, Suffolk, and Cambridgeshire. Within the project area we defined a Core where we could try to remove all the mink. Outside this, an intensely trapped Buffer, where we knew that there would always be immigration but we hoped that the 60km width of the Buffer, coupled with the topography, would be sufficient to stop immigration into the Core.