Maryland’s woodland vole records spread across fifteen counties, but they lean east: Prince George’s County leads with 34 reports, and Dorchester and Anne Arundel follow, putting the record’s center of gravity in the wooded suburbs and tidal plain around the Chesapeake. Western Maryland contributes only lightly, a few records from Frederick and Garrett counties.
Reports arrive in every season, cresting in April and May. For a vole that spends its life in runways under leaf litter, a spring bulge in records mostly means spring trapping, when small-mammal surveys resume and breeding animals start to wander.
NatureServe ranks the woodland vole S5, secure, in Maryland, and the record’s breadth backs it. This is a forest-floor animal, tied to deciduous woods with deep litter and loose soil, and Maryland still holds plenty of that from the coastal plain into the Piedmont. Places like Patapsco Valley State Park and the county park systems threading the suburbs are exactly the patchwork where it persists.
