Animal Traps In The Peak District

Include a little history in your walks. Pecsaetan - Ancient Derbyshire, Staffordshire and South Yorkshire - http://pecsaetan.weebly.com/

Include a little history in your walks. Pecsaetan - Ancient Derbyshire, Staffordshire and South Yorkshire - http://pecsaetan.weebly.com/

Cant claim absolute certainty, but as an educated guess

Who=National Trust(its their land)or a contractor

Why=Trap Mink

Why=Yes, they are a huge problem, the difficulty is though, the traps are almost never sprung as the mink is too sly a critter.

They are a huge problem elseware in derbyshire too, and its not just the birds they go for, anything is fair game.

Mink (a non-native predator, introduced partly by escapes of fur-farmed mink, but also to a significant degree by deliberate releases from the farms by animal rights activists) are a large part of the reason native Otter and water vole populations declined so much over the past few decades, so Mink control is a big part of management on many nature reserves, and, along with general habitat improvement, is the reason these populations are now rising again.

For mink the traps are often on floating rafts, and will often be replaced with an open tunnel with a 'footprint pad' used for assessing the presence of Mink when the trap itself is not in use.

Mink has only one predator in the UK...thats us.  Not only that, but unlike stoats and weasels who kill for food and eat all theor prey, mink will kill just for the fun of it.

Ironically, the vast majority (I am lead to believe) of mink releases were caused  by animal liberationists.  To my knowlege there are nomink farms left in the UK and they all closed in the early 1990s