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no-kidding-bona-fide rat rats as
Deptford Water Voles
to protect the sensibilities of visitors. But if you’re in
the know it’s easy to distinguish between the two,
water voles have a blunt muzzle whereas rats are
much more, well pointy faced. Ongoing mink culls
are helping to re-establish the water vole population –
inmates at Spring Hill open prison at Grendon
Underwood between Bicester and Aylesbury have
been making mink traps and farmers along the
Thames have been encouraged to stop their cattle
from grazing right at the river’s edge to prevent them
trampling down water vole (and otter) habitat
although this is clearly not entirely successful as
several boaters blogs still warn of reaches where you
might be woken rudely on your meadow mooring by
cows using your vessel as a scratching board!
Good Ratty - Bad Ratty!
Tales of the Riverbank
If you live in the Thames Basin at least some of
your tap water comes from the Thames and that’s
Cotswolds limestone with a dash of Chilterns chalk
furring up your kettle. In 1957 the River Thames was
declared biologically dead and yet a little over 50
years later the same river won an international prize
as one of the world’s cleanest metropolitan rivers
supporting more than 125 different fish species
including salmon.
Wild otters clung on in the Thames until the 1970s
when intensive use of agricultural pesticides finally
saw them off. In 1999 David Attenborough launched
a project to tempt them back
to the river and its
tributaries in Surrey, Berkshire, Buckinghamshire
and Oxfordshire. The return of wild otter to the
Thames has been so successful that by 2010
the
Environment Agency reported that otters had
returned to every English county except Kent.
Sometimes however the excited cry of
otter!
must
be tempered with a sobering
no, not otter, mink
!
The American Mink, small, dark and deadly
carnivores established themselves in the wild here
very soon after fur farms were set up in the UK in
the 1930s. They have devastated the water vole
population – remember that Ratty from Wind in the
Willows was actually a water vole.
Here in dear old Deptford I routinely label our proper