Brook Keepers, by Rowena Castell

An original contemporary magazine article.

Three years ago, nobody at Copthorne Vale Academy had ever seen a water vole. The brook that runs along the edge of the playing field was choked with crisp packets and fallen branches, and the last record of voles there dated from 1987.

Then science teacher Gwen Morfey started an after-school club called the Brook Keepers. With a grant of £2,400 from a regional wildlife trust, the club bought waders, litter pickers and fifty young plants of yellow iris and sweet grass for the banks. Every Thursday, twenty pupils from Years 7 to 11 clear rubbish, measure the water level and check small floating rafts of clay for footprints. They have also learned to spot neat piles of grass stems that voles leave behind, each one nibbled off at a sharp angle.

Last spring the wildlife trust released forty voles, bred in captivity, along the brook. This summer the club found at least six new burrows, with young voles at their entrances, showing that the voles are breeding.

Oskar, in Year 9, joined only because his best friend did. Now he wants to become an ecologist. ‘I used to think nature was something on the television,’ he says. ‘Now I check the rafts before I check my phone.’

(a) How much money did the wildlife trust give the club? (b) What do the young voles at the new burrows show? (c) What does Oskar’s final comment suggest about how the club has changed him?