Prevent lawn damage from moles, voles, and critters

Do you suffer from ongoing lawn damage? ?Much like the resistance and brutality Rambo faced when wandering into a small Washington town, the voles of my neighborhood are about to face the same intolerance.

If you have never heard of a vole, apparently your lawn is undesirable to their taste buds! If you have heard of them, you know the struggle is real and they damage anything in their path. They are destructive to good tasting lawns, check out the damage in the picture below (our grass last spring). The majority of our 1/2 acre looked this way…frustrating!

Voles are mouse-like creatures that wreak havoc by chewing through grass root systems. Unfortunately, they multiply quickly so infestations must be dealt with at a swift pace. Below are a few methods of removing voles from your property.

Eliminate the Rodents!

1. Make your property uninhabitable: Essentially, this is saying remove anything a vole or critter may enjoy or need to survive from your property. They chew through grass roots resulting in lawn damage, so it looks like removing the grass is how this would go down. They live around wood piles, brush, or under sheds. Looks like that’s all gone as well. As fun as this method sounds, I am without a doubt going to be looking for a new wife if I remove our grass and everything else from our lawn. This method is out.
2. Live traps/snap traps: This was?my first attempt,?and can confirm they had no interest in cheese or peanut butter.
3. Red Fox Urine: You read that correctly, urine. Not sure how they extract this, but I’ve heard good things about using it for vole control. This one entails spraying the vole source (log pile, brush, garden, etc.) with red fox urine to scare them off, apparently red foxes feed on voles so they are natural enemies. I am considering this approach.
4. d-CON: The thought of using d-CON scares me a bit, Fluffy next door may think she’s a vole and attempt to feast. Then we’ll owe our neighbor a cat and backyard pleasantries will be awkward. I’m on the fence with this method, but will probably table it for now.
5. Explosives: A couple of friends recommend explosives. If this were a consideration, I would also need to post “how to build a doghouse”, so I have somewhere to sleep.

Update: after attempting some of the above, the only approach that worked was creating bait stations. To do so, I cut 1′ lengths of 1.25″ PVC and inserted a chunk of Farnam Just One Bite poison, then added a 90 degree elbow to each end to keep domestic animals out of there. Dead voles everywhere, no more lawn damage!

Hope this helps!?