Strictly carnivorous, mink eat mostly frogs, salamanders, fish, crayfish, muskrats, mice, and voles, along with aquatic birds and their eggs.
Its many rivers, such as the Wye, Derwent and Dove are more quietly heralded by anglers, who as well their catch of rainbow or brown trout, may also spot otters, kingfishers and water voles along the banks.
The voles, along with hundreds of others from across the UK, are being reintroduced into the Meon Valley in Hampshire, where the mammal is considered "locally extinct".
Among small mammals, this placement is confirmed by the presence of Mimomys voles along with archaic representatives of Terricola and Microtus.
This month a local group are going vole-watching along the river.
It looks picturesque, with moss and flowers covering fallen trunks, and voles scampering along them, but it is also key to the forest's exceptional biodiversity: the dead wood hosts millions of organisms, which in turn sustain incredible numbers of, often rare, birds.
Eighty per cent of their diet is small fish; the rest is what comes along: mice, voles, birds, frogs.
We take advantage of the considerable variation in density along the vole cycle to analyse the extent to which the timing of the onset and end of the breeding season result from an interaction between seasonality and density (see [ 17, 23] for studies conducted on the close relative M. agrestis).
Analyses of fox stomachs indicated that A. terrestris was the most frequently consumed intermediate host (23 ), and E. multilocularis is highly prevalent (mean 9.1%, maximum 20.9%) in this vole species, which lives predominantly along the city border (22 ).
In weeks, 40 voles were captured, along with 20 more on an old section of canal running through Studley Grange.
