There is such a thing as a free lunch! Join us for a celebration of the achievements made during the Green Recovery Challenge Funded phase of our campaign to make East Anglia’s waterways a safe place for our native wildlife! We will be having an afternoon learning about the recovery of water voles, otters and other wildlife. Find out how the mink eradication programme has been working across the East Anglian region, our plans for expanding and consolidating this work and how you can help us achieve the dream of a mink-free East Anglia in the coming months and years.

The event will be held at Cambourne Village College, in the headwaters of the Bourn Brook valley in South Cambridgeshire. The Bourn Brook is where Vince Lea made his first steps into the world of mink control, with the Countryside Restoration Trust in 2010. Working with Ruth Hawksley from the Wildlife Trust for Bedfordshire, Cambridgeshire and Northamptonshire the ‘Bourn Free’ project has charted the disappearance of mink and the re-colonisation by water voles, with additional benefits to the local moorhen, mallard and otter populations. Lessons learned from this project have helped us design the massive regional-scale project which Waterlife Recovery East has become.

This will also be a chance to chat with fellow mink trapping volunteers, pick up any important spare parts for rafts you supervise and share your experiences. We can also take delivery of any frozen mink you may have! We will have a chance to look at some of the features of mink which our dissections reveal and explore how the information you give us about your mink raft visits are inputted into the all-important database and look at the sorts of outputs which this system can deliver to help us understand the progress of the eradication.

The event will be held on Saturday 23rd April, Cambourne Village College, Sheepfold Lane, Cambourne, Cambs, CB23 6FR.

13:15 Welcome and lunch (provided)

14:00 Talks and presentations

16:00 Refreshments and demonstrations

17:00 Field trip to local Wildlife Trust reserve at Cambourne, to look at Water Vole field signs (optional)

There are still plenty of places left, please contact Vince Lea to reserve your place by Friday 22nd April. We will hopefully have similar events around the region as the project progresses so if this is too far for you let us know if you would like something more local. Contact Vince on vlea@countrysiderestorationtrust.com. Please let us know if you have any dietary or access requirements.

Featured image by Jackie Dent