Photo by Laurie Smith, USDA
Anyone who lives in the country probably knows what a vole is. For the benefit of my city-dwelling friends, however, a vole, or meadow vole, is a rodent. It’s larger than a mouse and not quite as cute, and smaller than a rat and not quite as … shiver-inducing. (Not that rats induce shivers in me, I actually quite like them and have had several as pets, I’m talking about the reaction of the general population.) In size they’re rather hamster-ish. In appearance they’re almost hamster-ish, too … or would be if they didn’t have tails.
As the above photos shows, voles really are not all that intimidating; they’re primarily passive in nature, and they’re … well, they’re sort of cute.
Sort of cute … unless they’ve invaded one’s home.
Which, unfortunately, the voles around here … have. Ours. Not our voles, our home. Well, I guess now they’re our voles, too, aren’t they?
Voles don’t normally move inside human abodes. They’re more comfortable in fields and thickets and the underbrush of the woods. They will make an underground mess of a garden, but that is the usual human complaint about the species … not home invasion. Unfortunately, the underbrush of a large sector of woods down the road from us was disturbed by an infuriating logging situation. It was that summer that the voles, their natural habitat destroyed, made their way to our house — that winter when we realized that we had a problem.
To the voles’ credit, our “home” is a trailer. Oh, it’s a double wide, and when new, it was one of those double wides about which visitors always said, “This is so nice, I can’t believe it’s a trailer.” But a trailer (mobile home, to be kind) it is, and after five … ten … fifteen … and now we’ve passed twenty years, it has done what trailers are wont to do.
It’s falling apart.
Even when you keep up with general maintenance, mobile homes eventually fall apart. They’re not even made of real wood, after all, but that pressboard stuff which turns into mush if it gets wet repeatedly. Since the roof of a mobile home will invariably leak, getting wet repeatedly isn’t something you can really avoid. Before long, the rodents are going to discover that a mobile home in the country is an easy-access, warm and cozy place to raise a family.
They don’t usually give a … rat’s … um, never mind … that there’s already a family (ours, hello!?) being raised there.
I wouldn’t mind sharing the space, actually, if they didn’t have a penchant for pooping in the silverware drawer and there weren’t so many horror stories floating about regarding chewed electrical wires.
Anyway. Back to the voles.
We also have mice. I, being who I am, detest killing them. My husband, on the other hand, despite the fact that he’s actually an animal lover, doesn’t consider small home-invading vermin as worthy of relocation. He only lets me put out “mice cubes” (live traps that work really well) instead of snap-traps due to a (diminishing) sense of patience for his wife’s idiosyncrasies. He even “takes the mice for a walk” whenever they’re caught, and releases them in the woods far from home. (An aside … if one is to use live traps, one MUST release far … and I mean FAR … from home. Witness the winter day I only walked to the end of our 250 foot driveway and across the lane into the woods … and then found myself racing a mouse all the way back to the house!)
Mice cubes, however, are just a tad too small to accurately trap a vole. Oh, we’ve caught a few, but only after the voles have emptied the traps out without being caught several times. It takes getting the bait all the way to the back of the trap, and a smallish vole, for the device to work. Does a fantastic job with mice, though.
The vole of my tale, however, is not a smallish vole. In fact, it’s the largest one I’ve seen. Last night, I sat at the kitchen table, with a direct line of sight into the laundry room, and observed in fascination as our Siamese cat, Sasha (who is sixteen), waited patiently for the vole to emerge. It kept sticking its head out from under the dryer, and then, finally, showed its full length, directly in front of the cat.
Brazen little fellow.
Sasha lunged, and the vole ducked back under the dryer, blowing raspberries all the way. (Tom and Jerry, anyone?)
I set up a mice cube, tilting the bird seed bait all the way to the back.
This morning, my husband came in to tell me that he’d watched “that damn rat” come out from under the dryer, grab the edge of the cube in its teeth, shake it till seeds rattled forward, and then stick just its head under the flap opening and help itself to a mouthful of seeds before returning to its hiding place.
Even I was stunned.
He took a piece of cardboard and wedged the trap so it wouldn’t shake, and then watched the vole try again to shake it, and continue to return to hiding instead of reaching farther in for the seeds.
So, naturally, after my husband went for a walk, his animal communicator wife decided to talk to the vole.
I told it I didn’t want to see it die, but my husband had no such reservations.
I told it the trap it was avoiding was a harmless one, and if it would go in there, I promised it would be released in a safe place where it could live a natural, happy life and “be a vole”.
I could feel it listening, though it never deigned to respond. In fact, if anything, all I received back was pretty much a “yeah, whatever.”
(Mental note: voles are teenagers.)
I happened to be eating an oatmeal cookie at the time, so thought I might see if the vole’s interest would turn to the cookie. I showed it how good the cookie tasted, and felt a response. Therefore, I promised to share my cookie with the vole if he would please just go into the safe trap, so we could release him into the wild where he belonged.
I tucked a bite of cookie, complete with a nice juicy raisin, into the trap, way in the back, and left the room.
Ten minutes later, I returned.
The trap sat there, apparently undisturbed.
The seeds were not touched.
It was most decidedly vole-less.
And the cookie was gone.
I think I’ll see if mice cubes come in rat size.
Links of Interest:
- Univ. of Minnesota’s Cedar Creek Mammals Page (source of the photo)
- Wikipedia entry on the Meadow Vole
- Mice Cubes at Amazon.com
And? Did you catch him yet?
J
Nope, he’s still outsmarting us!