As the distribution map below shows, the majority of water voles in the Durham Wildlife Trust area are in south Tyne and Wear and the north east of County Durham. There are smaller populations to the west in Teesdale and Weardale.
The first phase of Durham Wildlife Trust’s water vole conservation work began in 2003, when all available survey information was gathered together to give as accurate a picture as possible of the water vole population. This work was done as part of the Heritage Lottery funded ‘From Coals to Voles’ project, which also provided funding for further work to help safeguard the remaining populations.
In the majority of cases the most effective and sustainable way to protect a species is to provide it with as large an area of suitable habitat as possible, which allows the species to increase in numbers and expand in range. DWT adopted this approach with ‘From Coals to Voles’ and worked with a variety of partners including Gateshead, South Tyneside and Sunderland Councils and the Environment Agency to improve habitat around and between existing colonies to allow water vole numbers to naturally increase. This important work is still ongoing and the new water vole project is now throughout the whole Durham Wildlife Trust area. Providing connections between existing water vole colonies allows voles to travel across the landscape and in effect create one large population where before there were several smaller isolated populations. The smaller isolated populations are much more vulnerable to chance circumstances such as the arrival of a predator or flood events, as their isolation makes inward migration of water voles from other areas impossible. Once the water vole population is lost, it is lost forever.
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