\n The animal was seen at Sankey Valley Park on Christmas Day at around 1pm.\n<\/p>\n
\n It was in a culvert near the water, which is a \u2018very common mink habitat\u2019.\n<\/p>\n
\n It isn\u2019t the first time a mink has been spotted at Sankey Valley Park, with walkers coming across the animals on multiple occasions since around 2012.\n<\/p>\n
\n Last time one was spotted in Warrington, Cheshire Wildlife Trust said that they are \u2018a serious threat to much-loved water voles\u2019.\n<\/p>\n
\n A spokesperson told the Warrington Guardian: \u00a0“American mink, as well as habitat loss and damage, are a serious threat to our much-loved water voles.\n<\/p>\n
\n \u201cBetter known as \u2018Ratty\u2019 in the children\u2019s classic The Wind in the Willows, water voles are a vital part of river ecosystems. Their burrowing, feeding and movements help to create conditions for other animals and plants to thrive – a bit like beavers do, but on a much smaller scale.\n<\/p>\n
\n \u201cOnce a regular sight in ditches, streams and rivers across the UK, water voles are sadly our fastest declining mammal.\n<\/p>\n
\n \u201cWater voles have suffered these huge declines because of habitat loss, pollution of waterways, industrialisation of agriculture, housing development and predation by American mink.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"The animal was seen at Sankey Valley Park on Christmas Day at around 1pm. It was in a…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":341109,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[26],"tags":[90,56,54,55,4407],"class_list":["post-341108","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-wildlife","tag-science","tag-uk","tag-united-kingdom","tag-unitedkingdom","tag-wildlife"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/341108","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=341108"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/341108\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/341109"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=341108"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=341108"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=341108"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}