A PLEA to help rid a plague of rats from the Basins nature reserve in Wellington will be made to town councillors today Monday (March 7).

Councillors have been negotiating with the Crown Estates for many months to buy the beauty spot to give it the protection of being in public ownership.

Now, they are being asked to provide funding for volunteers who help to maintain and preserve the Basins so they can tackle an increasing number of brown rats around the area.

The volunteers blame rats for the absence of any ducklings in the two Basins ponds and surrounding streams over the past 12 months for the first time since a duck house was installed three years ago. Rats were believed to be killing them.

The Wellington Basins Volunteer Group (WBVG) has applied for a grant of £1,800 from the council to cover the cost of a pest control regime for the next 12 months.

The money would be used to hire specialists to monitor and control the unwanted rodents using species-specific humane trapping and baiting methods.

WBVG secretary Sue Adams said: “The Basins area is enjoyed by many people from the Wellington area. WBVG strives to make the area as safe as possible for the public. Comments have been made by the public about the increase in rats in the area.”

Cullompton-based Valley Pest Control surveyed the Basins last summer and again last month, and reported regular sightings of rats on land and in the water, and evidence of rats burrowing underneath pedestrian walkways and climbing into waste bins.

Although new, closed-style waste bins had been installed since last summer and would help to reduce rat activity, the rodents were now burrowing under them.

The company said it was thought that visitors feeding ducks and other birds in the ponds were contributing to a food source for the rats and potential food was also being left behind by anglers.

It said brown rats were an incredibly adaptable mammal, could be found almost everywhere in the UK, and possessed a portfolio of physical and behavioural capabilities which made them ‘the ultimate survivors’.

A female brown rat could breed from the age of three months and produce an average of five litters a year each with up to 12 young.

They carried several unpleasant diseases which could be passed to humans, usually through their urine which they dribbled constantly.

Town councillor John Thorne, who is also one of Wellington’s two county councillors and who has been leading the moves to buy the Basins, said: “I have seen rats occasionally when I walk through the Basins but I had no idea there were so many of them.

“Reading the volunteers’ application for funding was illuminating and slightly scary stuff, and they have certainly won my support for funding even before we get to Monday’s meeting. I am wondering if we actually need to go further.

“I do hope, though, that nobody is put off from visiting the Basins because it is such a lovely and tranquil place, and I will still encourage my sons to go there.

“If the town council can get ownership soon, then we will be able to do much more to help the volunteer group, such as helping to educate visitors to either dispose of waste properly or to take it home with them.

“And maybe we can look at helping to encourage a revival in other wildlife such as water voles, which I recall when I was a youngster were abundant in both ponds.”