About the Film

Restoring Ratty is a water vole documentary film made with Northumberland Wildlife Trust, following one of the largest water vole reintroduction programmes ever undertaken in the UK. Between 2016 and 2022, the project returned more than 2,200 water voles to the burns and watercourses of Kielder Water and Forest Park, where the species had been absent for thirty years. The film documents the work at the heart of that effort: the careful capture of donor animals in the North Pennines, their overwintering at a captive breeding facility in Devon, and the moment when the first voles were finally released back into the Northumberland landscape.

The project was a partnership between Northumberland Wildlife Trust, Forestry England and Tyne Rivers Trust, funded by the National Lottery Heritage Fund. It was unusual among water vole reintroductions in drawing its breeding stock from wild populations rather than rescued animals displaced by development, a decision made deliberately to preserve the genetic character of the voles that would originally have lived in this part of Northumberland.

This water vole documentary film follows the people who made it happen: project officers, volunteers, captive breeding specialists and ecologists, all working together across a long chain of effort that began in a North Pennines field and ended with the sound of voles moving through bankside grass at Kielder.

A Species on the Edge

Water voles were once a familiar presence on waterways across Britain. The decline has been severe, with the species losing an estimated 97% of its former range over recent decades, driven by habitat loss and, above all, predation by the American mink, which escaped or was released from fur farms and spread rapidly through river systems where water voles had no defence against it. It is the central subject of this water vole documentary film because without understanding that decline, the scale of the Kielderhead reintroduction makes little sense.

The conditions at Kielder made reintroduction viable. Forestry England had been controlling mink since the 1990s, and years of monitoring had confirmed the area was virtually mink-free. Changes in forest management had also created better riparian habitat along the burns, with trees planted back from the water’s edge and more diverse vegetation along the banks. The landscape was ready. The question was how to bring the voles back safely, and in sufficient numbers to establish a breeding population that could spread through the wider catchment.

“Water voles are a native species that used to be plentiful all over the country, and various factors such as habitat loss — and probably most importantly, the American mink — has wiped out their population, often as escapees from fur farms.” — Graham Holyoak, Restoring Ratty Project Officer, Northumberland Wildlife Trust

From Devon to Kielder

The breeding programme was run by Derek Gow Consultancy in Devon, whose founder has been working with water voles since the early 1990s and has been involved in reintroductions across the British Isles. Donor animals were trapped in the North Pennines in late summer, selecting only juveniles weighing under 160 grams — animals from late litters unlikely to survive the winter in any case, so that capturing them caused no harm to the donor populations. Additional animals came from Scotland, chosen because their genetics closely matched those of the former Kielder population. Every decision in the breeding programme was shaped by the same principle that runs through this water vole documentary film as a whole: that the genetics and character of the original Kielder population were worth preserving.

The voles overwintered at the Devon facility, were paired up in spring, and produced the litters that would form the first release cohort. Jenny Tratt of Derek Gow Consultancy worked through the pairing process, matching males and females of similar weight and watching for the gestation cycle of three weeks that could mean baby voles within a month. The animals were then transported back up to Northumberland and released into the Kielder burns through a combination of soft releases, where pairs or family groups spent several days in bankside pens before the doors were opened, and harder releases at sites where access made pen deployment impractical.

“The animals we place here will go back up to Northumberland. They’ll probably find ancient ancestral burrow systems in the banks of the peaty-sided streams that we can’t even see. They’ll recolonise those, they’ll breed up there, and then the populations will expand year on year.” — Derek Gow, Derek Gow Consultancy

The Work of Volunteers

One of the things the film wanted to capture was the scale of volunteer effort that the project depended on. Staff from Northumberland Wildlife Trust led the fieldwork, but the releases would not have been possible without the network of people who helped set pens, carry equipment across rough upland terrain, chop apples, fill straw, monitor sites and turn up whenever they were needed. At Kielder, that terrain was demanding: steep, wet, uneven ground far from any road, where carrying a release pen required care and patience — exactly the kind of quiet, unspectacular effort that a water vole documentary film has to find ways to honour.

Tom Dearnley of Forestry England noted that the volunteer involvement had done something beyond simply providing labour. It had drawn the community into the project, creating a wider sense of shared investment in what was happening on the burns. Members of the public were invited to see the voles before release; local schools took part in capture, breeding and release across different phases of the project; and word of the reintroduction spread in ways that formal public engagement rarely manages.

“The volunteers have been really the fundamental reason why this project has been successful. It’s meant that the workforce we have available is massively increased, but it also means that there’s much wider engagement in this project, which is something that we’re very proud of.” — Tom Dearnley, Forestry England

“I love being out in the countryside, and I do it because I’m interested in conservation. It gives me a great deal of reward. I do it because I like the people I meet whilst I’m doing it, the people I work with — and because I get such a variety of experiences working with the Wildlife Trust.” — Mel Rockett, Volunteer

Filming the Release

I filmed Restoring Ratty across the capture and release phases, moving between the North Pennines trapping sites, the breeding facility in Devon and the burn sides at Kielder where the releases took place. The film needed to hold two things at once: the practical, procedural reality of conservation work — traps, weights, gestation periods, baffle plates, straw — and the feeling in the room, or on the hillside, when a vole that had been carried hundreds of miles was finally let go into its new habitat.

The moment of release is brief and quiet. A small animal disappears into grass and is gone. What the film tries to hold onto is the accumulated effort that preceded that moment: the years of mink monitoring, the Devon winter, the careful genetics, the volunteer days on uneven ground. Conservation work at this scale involves a lot of patience and a long chain of trust between people, institutions and the landscape itself. I wanted the film to reflect that without overplaying the drama of it. Making a water vole documentary film means accepting that the most important moments are often the smallest ones.

Water voles are not charismatic in the way that otters or ospreys are. They are small, secretive and easily missed. Part of what drew me to this project was the seriousness with which the Restoring Ratty team treated that modesty — not trying to make the vole into something it is not, but arguing quietly and carefully that a small animal in a bankside burrow is worth years of collective effort.