Signs of voles in your garden may include runways on the surface of the ground on in your lawn.
Voles in yard signs.
How to recognize vole activity in your garden.
Look for irregular paths of clipped and trampled grass or soil.
A vole s burrow can be identified by holes found in lawns or around the base of trees.
Small tunnel entrances runways and burrows in your yard ranging from 1 2 wide.
Voles like dense heavy vegetative cover weeds and meadows because it provides them with protection from predators and provides nesting material.
Moles naturally aerate soil and eat the larvae of destructive insects.
You have to pinpoint the location of your voles to be most effective with your repellent methods.
An underground barrier around the perimeter of your yard can do just that.
The grass immediately surrounding the hole will be very short.
Vole runways are on the top of the soil created in the grass.
Common signs of vole damage include.
The runways may be about one to two inches wide.
Bury 1 4 inch hardware cloth in an 18 inch trench and tilt the bottom 4 inches at a 90 degree angle away from the yard to discourage animals from tunneling underneath it.
The track will be 1 2.
Prevention is very important to keep vole numbers down.
If you already have voles in your yard this type of barrier can keep them out of your flower gardens.
As they spend a lot of time in their subterranean burrows infestations of voles in the yard tend to go unnoticed until plants begin dying which is the result of the pests consuming their root systems and a sign that a large number of the animals are present.
Voles are often the culprit when there is damage to plants and lawns.
Make your yard inhospitable to voles.
Signs of voles in the yard.
The best way to find these pesky creatures is by looking for signs of vole damage.
Recognizing the surface runways created by voles will be the best indication of vole presence in your yard.
Signs of vole damage.
Since voles are not the only animal pests responsible for runways in lawn and garden areas they are often confused with other pests you d like to get rid of namely moles because both moles and voles are rarely seen it makes more sense to base identification on the signs they leave behind rather than on how the animals look.
Vole droppings and vegetation debris within surface runways.
Voles like to keep these often used runways clear and will keep the grass or other vegetation clipped close to the ground.
Once you have all the information you need you can develop a targeted strategy toward preventing further damage and removing them from your yard altogether.
A positive apple sign test will indicate where to place a vole control bait station system to gain control of the area.
The tell tale sign that you have a mole infestation is not seeing the mole itself but the presence of small volcano shaped mounds and raised ridges of dirt in your yard.
Small gnaw marks on bark.