New Jersey’s occurrence data include 145 meadow vole records, spread fairly evenly across the calendar with no sharp seasonal spike. That flat pattern fits an animal active in every month, moving through grass cover that hides it just as well in January as in July.
Runways through every kind of New Jersey grassland
A meadow vole needs damp, grassy or marshy ground to cut its runways through, and New Jersey offers several versions of that habitat across very different settings. Records come from the back-dune grass and salt marsh edges at Sandy Hook and Island Beach State Park on the Atlantic coast, the wet meadows of Great Swamp National Wildlife Refuge on a former glacial lake bed in the Piedmont, and streamside meadow along the Kittatinny Ridge near Delaware Water Gap National Recreation Area in the Highlands. Wherever thick grass meets damp soil, a vole can carve its network of surface trails through it.
Short-lived, fast-breeding, and central to the food web
A meadow vole rarely lives past a year in the wild, but it makes up for that short life with rapid breeding: females can produce several litters annually after a gestation of only about three weeks. That output makes the species one of the most important prey items in New Jersey’s grasslands and marsh edges, sustaining hawks, owls, foxes, and snakes that key in on the well-worn runways as a hunting cue.
Status in New Jersey
NatureServe hasn’t assigned the meadow vole a New Jersey conservation rank, but it’s native and turns up in grassy, damp habitat across the state.
