The reintroduction project has involved the creation of 20 ponds and scrapes, removing land drains, planting 26,000 trees and sowing 15 hectares (37 acres) of wildflower seed.<\/p>\n
Natural flood management measures and rewetting have also been introduced, with 1,700m (5,577 ft) of watercourse, alongside conservation grazing to support biodiversity.<\/p>\n
South said: “We’ve released about 110 voles. We might top that up depending on how they’re doing.<\/p>\n
“You’d expect that number to more than double, maybe triple, by the end of the season, and then numbers will drop back down again come the end of the winter.<\/p>\n
“If they do really well, they’ll expand out, and there’s a few neighbouring watercourses that we’re keeping an eye on to see if they turn up there as well.”<\/p>\n
South said the reintroduction was important because the animals “have a right to be there”. <\/p>\n
He added the reason for their decline is “because of mistakes that we’ve made in the past”.<\/p>\n
“They create burrows for other animals to use as dens and create a more complex habitat,” he said.<\/p>\n
“They’re a small mammal, and that just means that they become prey items for a lot of things. So, if you look at things like herons and foxes, they’re useful prey items for animals like that – they breed a lot and so they can cope with it.”<\/p>\n
Water voles were declared “functionally extinct” in North Devon in the year 2000, meaning their numbers were so low they were unlikely to produce a viable new generation.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"The reintroduction project has involved the creation of 20 ponds and scrapes, removing land drains, planting 26,000 trees…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":676309,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[26],"tags":[90,56,54,55,4407],"class_list":["post-676308","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\/676308","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=676308"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/676308\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/676309"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=676308"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=676308"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=676308"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}