I lost my garden cat that kept down the vole population, and this spring I find the varmints tunneling all over the place. I’ve seen advice to put snap traps along their routes, but this presents problems: the traps I can find don’t seem to have the snap power to kill a pine vole, and I don’t want to set them out in the open where they might get non-target animals. The covered traps I use for mice are of no interest to voles.
Poison concerns me as well, for the same reason, if non-target predators consume the poisoned voles.
I’ve killed maybe 100 voles (meadow) over the past few years. I live by big open fields and they like to try to make my garage their home. I use the plastic easy set traps and i bait them mainly with small pieces of apple. Peanut butter also works, but its messy to clean. Sometimes just setting the trap with nothing along where they run gets them. I put out half a dozen traps at least when i’m looking to do some killing. I cleaned them out over the winter and haven’t seen any lately. I’ve never used poison but its been tempting.
I also like to know a good way to control those. They have destroyed my outdoor fig trees and cut hardy kiwi to ground level, made many tunnels at front lawn. I put 1/4 inch hardware cloth to protect my trees and raise bed garden to prevent damaging. I tried to use trap, they sometime just eat the bait without getting caught. So far, I have not reach the goal of control them to a very small population, will keep on fight them these year.
Mass numbers of traps. Hardware cloth. They are easier to kill in winter when they have no other food. In summer they do seem more difficult to kill. Rabbits are the same way. Very easy to get in winter, in summer very difficult.
ltilton-
The JT Eaton JAWZ traps… i buy them up at Menards when they run them on sale.
Amazon is waay expensive on those…Menards runs them for a couple bucks for a 2 pack.
Yeah. I need to setup everything at late fall though. Most year, the ground is covered by a feet of snow in winter and can’t see those little bastards.
I had a bunch of trees that i was going to overwinter in pots in the ground… covered them with leaves/etc… go out in Oct and check on them and almost every one was chewed on. It was war after that.
The things are almost like small hamsters.
You can put them under a cover… In summer i try to cover them somehow so they don’t get rained out. In winter they are in the garage so i just set a bunch of them against the wall.
They’re a tad bigger than white-footed mice, definitely bigger than house mice. But I think a rat trap would be overkill and I fear what else it might catch, outside in the open.
A cat is really the best solution, if you have the right cat and the coyote doesn’t get it.
Some thoughts from my experiences. If the ground rodents come to the surface at all the cats are helpful. There are cats that run loose around here but don’t think they’ve made a dent in the population much at all. I’ve caught them on my game camera. Once they start digging, the rodent is gone, and you have a hole. Same with dogs and moles.
The size of the trap is kinda important. Once you bait and set it, cover it with a bucket (I use a medium landscaping pot) and put a brick on top. If you come back and the bait is gone and trap is not sprung, then you need a more sensitive, aka smaller trap. If the pot is disturbed and your trap is gone, you need a larger trap.
The bait should be switched out: peanut butter, sunbutter (sunflower seed butter), apples, etc. Once one bait is successful it seems that the others know to stay away from that smell.
I have two female cats and two male cats and it looks like a fresh batch of kittens is on the way, no voles in sight. I buy a bag of cat food about once a month and it keeps them around. The real hunters are the females especially after they have a litter.
This is my vole killing machine. They look into the small pond, have no idea how deep it is as I put a few stones in the bottom. They jump in for a drink of water and don’t jump out!
