Rhode Island’s occurrence databases hold 225 meadow vole records, a middling count that puts the species in the state’s “occasional” tier for small mammals. That tally tracks where someone happened to search through grass, not how many voles actually live in Rhode Island.
Block Island’s grasslands anchor the state’s clearest cluster
Block Island National Wildlife Refuge carries the state’s strongest concentration of reports, and the island’s habitat explains why. Its open maritime grasslands, among the largest remaining on the East Coast, stand in for the forest that dominates the mainland, and meadow voles depend on that kind of dense, undisturbed sod to cut the maze of surface runways the species is known for. Those same grasslands draw wintering short-eared owls and northern harriers, both of which hunt voles as a mainstay of their diet.
Reservoir edges and old fields fill in the interior uplands
Arcadia Management Area and Big River Management Area sit in Rhode Island’s western uplands, where pine-oak forest covers most of the ridgeline but reservoir margins, utility corridors, and old farm fields break up that canopy. Those grassy seams, not the surrounding woods, are where a meadow vole can dig in and travel; the closed forest floor doesn’t offer the low, matted grass cover the species needs.
Status in Rhode Island
The meadow vole is native to Rhode Island, per USGS NAS and NatureServe Explorer records. NatureServe leaves the state rank unranked (SNR) for lack of dedicated local survey data, though the species carries a globally secure G5 rank rangewide.
