So I was walking along the walkway that leads from my front door to my driveway today. Between the walkway and my house, I have an area that has various types of bushes and other plants (although I wouldn’t call it a garden) growing out of soil covered with mulch. Today, I noticed that several of those bushes, had small (1-2 inches in width) tunnels radiating from out from under them, and connecting to other bushes. I witnessed one of those tunnels as it was being dug, as I saw the earth displacing itself from underneath. I caught a glimpse of the critter as the earth fell around it for a moment before it disappeared underground. I didn’t get much of a look at it, but it appeared to be a small rodent-like mammal, like a large mouse or a small rat.
Any idea what I’m dealing with here? My first, completely uninformed thought, was that it was a mole, but when I image googled “mole” the results didn’t look at all like what I thought I saw – what I saw was much smaller, and more mouse-like in appearance.
The shallow tunneling is definitely what we’ve seen with the meadow voles we have in our back garden. We’ve confirmed their presence via a couple of bodies we’ve found in the swale, and via the cotoneaster they destroyed (they ate all of the roots early last spring).
Yeah, they can be destructive little buggers. They will tunnel through snow in order to gnaw the bark off plants. They can girdle young trees and kill them.
Hey, I just watched that movie last week! It’s one of the fifty – yep, count 'em – fifty choice offerings included in the horror movies box set (fifty flicks for twenty bucks) available at certain big-box electronics retailers…
