Vole Or Mouse? Reading The Trails In Your Yard

A narrow path of flattened grass crossing a lawn, with open holes an inch and a half to two inches across at the ends of it and no mounds of soil anywhere, is vole work. Voles are outdoor rodents. The University of California IPM program says they are poor climbers and usually do not enter homes or other buildings, which makes them a landscape problem rather than a house problem.

The trails tend to show up about now, when the grass stops growing and the perennials get cut back. November is a good month to find them, because nearly everything that can be done about voles has to happen before the ground freezes and the first snow covers the evidence.

Vole, Mole Or Mouse? Read The Ground, Not The Animal

You will probably never see the animal, so the damage has to do the identifying. Three different animals get blamed for each other's work, and each leaves a signature that is hard to confuse once you know it.

If you do get a look at one, Penn State says tail length is the best way to separate a vole from a mouse. UC IPM gives the numbers: a vole's tail runs about a quarter to half the length of its head and body, while a deer mouse carries a tail over seventy percent of that length along with large, obvious ears. We went through the indoor lookalikes in rats versus mice in Ohio homes.

What A Vole Actually Is

The one doing this in Northeast Ohio is almost always the meadow vole. The Ohio Department of Natural Resources calls it the most widely distributed of the voles, dark brown with a silvery to buff or gray belly, a bi colored tail and long, soft fur. It lives in meadows, fields and grassy marshes, and eats seeds, sedges, grain, grasses and bark. That habitat list covers the field edges around Hartville and Lake Township as neatly as it covers a state park.

The reproduction explains how a clean yard ends up laced with trails in one season. ODNR has meadow voles breeding year round, heaviest from March through November, with gestation of twenty one days, litters of one to nine young and weaning at two weeks. Penn State puts a typical female at one to five litters a year. A quiet winter is no promise about the next one.

Why November Matters More Than July

Voles do not hibernate. BYGL is blunt about it: they stay active year round, even under snow, and snowmelt is when people discover the network of winding trails the animals expanded all winter while feeding out of sight. The damage found in March was done in January, under cover, while the yard looked like a yard.

Turf is the forgiving half. University of Minnesota Extension treats spring lawn damage as temporary: rake the dead grass out once the lawn is growing again, reseed the trails, and the turf closes over them. Woody plants are the half that does not forgive. Minnesota is equally plain that a tree girdled completely generally cannot be saved, although some shrubs, dogwood and ninebark among them, regrow from the base.

That gap is the argument for doing something in November. A guard put on this month protects a trunk through the months nobody can see it.

What To Do Before The Ground Freezes

• Cut the cover down: Minnesota Extension puts ground cover kept at three to six inches as the level that reduces both the food and the shelter voles rely on. Tall grass left standing over winter is the habitat.
• Pull mulch back off the trunks: Illinois Extension recommends moving mulch away from tree trunks because voles hide in it. UC IPM goes further and suggests keeping about three feet out from a trunk clear of vegetation, and Minnesota uses roughly two feet around young trees.
• Guard the young trees: Illinois Extension calls for hardware cloth of quarter inch mesh or smaller in guards at least eighteen inches tall. The University of New Hampshire uses that mesh in a twenty four inch width embedded at least two inches into the soil, while UC IPM buries the bottom four to six inches down. Keep the top above the snow depth you expect, since a guard a vole can walk over is decoration.
• Leave growing room and close the seam: UNH advises sizing a cylinder for several years of trunk growth and fastening the ends snugly, because a gap at the seam is a door. Wrap around plastic guards often fail over a winter.
• Put it on the fall list permanently: UNH says to check guards every year, preferably before the ground freezes. Illinois says plainly that fall is the time to get them on.
• Trap where it is worth trapping: Minnesota Extension suggests mouse snap traps set along the runways and baited with peanut butter, covered so pets and children cannot reach them.

When The Yard Problem Turns Into A House Problem

The two land in the same week often enough that people assume they are connected. They usually are not. UC IPM describes house mice as living in and around homes, schools and commercial buildings and moving indoors in autumn as the nights get colder, and the gap one needs is small: its exclusion standard is closing every opening larger than a quarter inch.

So the scratching in the wall and the trails in the lawn get solved separately. Sealing the house does nothing about voles, and mowing does nothing about mice. If the noise is indoors, the work starts at the foundation, the utility penetrations and the garage door seal, which we mapped in where mice get into Ohio homes, and continues as rodent control once something is already inside.

Who Handles Which Animal In Ohio

Ohio draws a line between the rodents that live with people and the wildlife that does not. Under Ohio Revised Code 1531.40, nobody may provide nuisance wild animal removal or control services for hire without a license from the chief of the Division of Wildlife. Minnesota Extension adds the other constraint: most baits recommended for voles are restricted products only certified applicators can apply.

Which leaves a clean division of labor. Voles in the landscape are mostly a habitat and barrier job you can do in an afternoon: mow it, clear the mulch, guard the trunks, trap the runways. Mice and rats working into a structure are the pest control side, handled with exclusion, control and monitoring and covered along with ants, spiders, roaches and seasonal invaders by State Shield Essential. We laid out where that line falls across every pest in what a quarterly plan does not cover.

If the trails stop at the lawn, you do not need us. If something is in the wall, the crawl space or the garage, that is worth a look from somebody who does this for a living. State Termite has worked Stark, Summit, Portage, Wayne and Tuscarawas counties since 1933, and the office answers around the clock. Get a free estimate or call 330-494-6199, and if pests come back between treatments, so do we, at no cost.