Tennessee’s meadow vole record holds 48 entries, thin for a species famous elsewhere for turning up by the thousands in a single grassy field.
A cold-climate rodent stranded on high ground
Meadow voles need thick, matted grass and damp meadow soil to cut their surface runways through, habitat that’s common at northern latitudes but scarce across most of Tennessee’s warmer lowlands. In the state’s mountains, that habitat survives mainly on the treeless, grassy balds and high clearings around Roan Mountain and inside Great Smoky Mountains National Park, cool, wet, high-elevation openings that mimic the meadows this vole depends on farther north. Cherokee National Forest’s records cluster around the same kind of high-country grass rather than the surrounding hardwood forest.
A June spike tied to the growing season
Records climb sharply in June, when the state’s high-elevation meadows are at their thickest and most accessible to a field survey. That doesn’t mean voles are scarce the rest of the year; a species this small and this buried in dense grass is easiest to document exactly when the vegetation it depends on is growing fastest.
Status in Tennessee
NatureServe lists the meadow vole as SNR, unranked, in Tennessee, though it’s globally secure at G5 and native to the state. Its Tennessee foothold is narrow by geography alone, tied to the handful of high mountain balds and meadows that offer the cool, grassy ground this species needs.
