A RARE water vole has been captured on camera dashing out of its burrow in the middle of a hailstorm in Oxfordshire.
The camera also caught a much larger and rarely-seen polecat sniffing around the burrow entrance.
The videos were captured on a stretch of the River Windrush in West Oxfordshire by the Berkshire, Buckinghamshire and Oxfordshire Wildlife Trust (BBOWT).
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The trust has been running a Water Vole Recovery Project since 1989 - the longest-standing project of its kind - that has helped revive local populations.
Lucy Stoddart, who set up the trail camera, said: "When I saw what we'd captured I was so excited: we do so much work to help water voles, but they are very shy so we rarely get to see them.
“I actually set up the camera to get some footage to show a group of survey volunteers I was training, so it was great to be able to show them these clips - and to top it off we even had a water vole swim by during one of the training sessions! I was blown away by how lovely and enthusiastic all the volunteers were - we are so lucky to have people who are so keen to help us."
The water vole is under serious threat across the UK from habitat loss and predation by the American mink - an introduced species.
It is protected in the UK under the Wildlife and Countryside Act, 1981, and classed as endangered on both the Great Britain and the England Red Lists for Mammals.
BBOWT’s Water Vole Recovery Project has significantly helped local populations.
In 2018 the National Water Vole Mapping Project suggested water vole presence had declined by 30 per cent between 2006 and 2015 across England and Wales.
By contrast, the known local water vole sites across Berkshire, Buckinghamshire and Oxfordshire have been steadily increasing during this period despite the continued national decline elsewhere: in 2008 the total area of known water vole activity in the three counties stood at 321 km2, and this increased by 78 per cent over the last 10 years to reach 603 km2 in 2018.
The polecat - a close relative of the ferret - has also suffered massive declines across the UK, and was once so persecuted it was on the brink of extinction in the UK. Thankfully, numbers are now increasing in rural Wales and parts of England.
You can find out more about the Berkshire, Buckinghamshire and Oxfordshire Wildlife Trust Water Vole Recovery Project at bbowt.org.uk/wildlifewildlife-conservation/water-vole-recovery-project
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