Our project is trying to protect water bowls by eradicating American mink from North Kent has been given the go ahead. Mink are an invasive species which pose a particular threat to the water bowl because the carnivorous mink view them as prey alongside other small mammals, fish and birds. Water bowls in contrast to vegetarian, they only eat grasses and water side plants, but now almost a hundred thousand pounds has been made available to the Kent Wildlife Trust to cull the mink between graves end of wistable and to reintroduce the bowls. Our environment correspondent, Evet Austin, has the details. American mink, an invader and a predator. So abundant now in the countryside, they've played a lead role in the collapse of native water bowl populations. So now a new project is underway to stop the mink in their tracks. So this habitat is actually potentially really good for water bowls and for a range of other bird species, I think that's more hen and coot. But the big problem is we've got very large populations of mink, American mink here. It's a non-native species and like anywhere where you reintroduce or you introduce something that's non-native, it causes havoc in the environment and we use these platforms here to monitor the presence of mink and to help control them. So how do you get them to go in there? Well, mink are curious creatures and they like small spaces like this so they start to use it, we'll monitor the signs of presence and then once we found that they're there, we'll put in the trap and start the trapping process before the mink start to breed. American mink were imported into Britain in the 1920s for fur farming, some escaped and some were deliberately released by animal rights protesters. They liked their new environment. The plan now is to call the mink on 80 square miles of North Kent from Sheppie to Seasilter. While we can control mink and enhance habitats very easily here, what we're trying to do with this project is expand our work across a far wider area. We've still got little pockets of water bowls in the North Kent marshes but they're really hanging on here, what we've habitat for augmentation and the pressures of the American mink. So it's hope that by working across this wide project area we're really going to give them a chance. And here at Wildwood near Canterbury there are water bowls in waiting, more than 80 breeding pairs producing animals that will be able to boost numbers in the wild once the mink have gone. So by protecting wetlands, controlling mink our children are going to be able to experience, you know, the little ratty here, ratty from wind and the willows back on our river banks. You've got Austin, BBC South East today near Canterbury.