With much of the UK’s wildlife facing an uncertain future, canals are a rare haven for nature. Thanks to you, we're carrying out vital work to provide homes and highways along our 2,000-mile network.
Water voles are becoming a rare sight on our canals and rivers.
Our Unlocking Biodiversity project, a new initiative funded in partnership with Severn Trent, is helping to turn around wildlife declines in the West Midlands. By connecting fragmented habitats and creating green corridors more local wildlife is surviving and thriving, including rare water voles, the UK's fastest declining mammal.
Water vole populations have sadly plummeted by a staggering 90-94% in the last 30 years alone, due to habitat loss, pollution, and predation by the invasive American mink. In the West Midlands, members of our Vole Patrol, a 70-strong volunteer citizen science survey project, have been keeping tabs on these important aquatic mammals for the past three years, on an incredible 480km of canals. Thanks to their diligent work, we now have a much greater understanding of the water vole’s plight, and crucially, where we can improve and extend habitat to help them most.
Water Vole (courtesy of Daniel Trim)
While the data showed a dramatic decline in the local water vole population (an incredible 93.5% over the last 30 years), it also revealed several isolated spots where the animals had managed to keep a foothold. From this, we were able to implement a number of targeted recovery projects aimed at linking up scattered populations and expanding the water vole's habitat.
Our main focus has been improving marginal aquatic habitat - where water meets land - and vital for the water vole's survival. As well as revitalising canal banks with aquatic plants and cutting back overgrown scrub and hedgerows, we’ve also begun installing coir rolls along the canal banks.
Chloe and the volunteers, putting in coir rolls for water vole habitat.
These living embankments, made from the husk of coconuts, create a ‘soft bank’ effect, allowing water voles to travel under the shelter and protection of marginal plants negotiate steep concrete banks and forage and burrow in nearby habitats. Pre-planted with carefully selected native vegetation that acts as a valuable food source, the coir rolls provide a safe passage along our canals and help them evade predation, extending the water vole's range and connecting up disparate populations.
So far, the project has been a big success, improving 41 kilometres of waterways across the West Midlands and making a significant contribution to the survival of this vulnerable species.
Bees are in sharp decline in the UK and globally.
In tandem with this initiative, the environment team in the West Midlands is also helping to boost declining insect populations, by enhancing 166 kilometres of hedgerow and grassland along local canals.
With a particular focus on bees and pollinators, which are a cornerstone of our ecosystem, staff and volunteers have been planting native species, such as blackthorn, buckthorn and wild privet, to improve biodiversity and create natural corridors for wildlife. Targeted help for our most declining species, such as planting kidney vetch, the sole larval food plant for the small blue butterfly, will go a long way to connecting isolated populations and helping reverse habitat loss for our most at risk invertebrates.
Volunteers are helping us plant more than 3,000 trees in our community orchard in the West Midlands
Integral to the project is the Great Canal Orchard, a future or potential record-breaking 50-mile-long community orchard eventually stretching from Wolverhampton to Worcester. Passing through the heart of Birmingham, from the Staffordshire & Worcestershire, Old Main Line, and Worcestershire & Birmingham canals, the orchard boasts a variety of fruiting trees, such as traditional and modern desert and cooking apples, plums, apricots, peaches, crab apple, damsons and common pear.
These species are all great for bees, butterflies and other wildlife, providing blossom full of nectar in the spring and sugary fruit in summer, and for peoples health, a potential future resource for communities to tap into. Once completed, the orchard will be the longest of its kind in the world, giving threatened species like the brown hairstreak butterfly and bullfinch a chance to thrive. Water voles are also partial to a desert apple.
Brown hairstreak butterfly. Credit Craig Jones
Living green corridors like the ones we’re establishing in the West Midlands, provide safe ‘highways’ for water voles, water shrews and otters to move along, and allow busy pollinators, like bees and butterflies, to thrive once again, flit easily from plant to plant. With your help, we’ll keep working on vital projects like these up and down the country, knitting together remote habitats and creating vibrant blue and green spaces full of wildlife across our network.
