West Virginia’s open occurrence records for the meadow vole number 128, most of them concentrated around Monongahela National Forest’s high-elevation wetlands and grass. That’s a measure of where people looked, not how many voles actually live in the state.
A grassland specialist in forest country
West Virginia is roughly four-fifths forest, so the meadow vole’s need for dense grass and sedge cover pushes it into the state’s scarcer open habitats: high mountain bogs and wet meadows in the Allegheny highlands around Canaan Valley and Dolly Sods, similar wet ground near Blackwater Falls State Park, and hayfields and pasture edges lower in the river valleys.
Recorded through nearly every month
Records here turn up in almost every month of the year rather than tracing a clean winter gap, which fits a species that stays active through the cold months in surface runways under snow and grass thatch instead of denning up. The heavy, long-lasting snowpack that builds in the Alleghenies around Canaan Valley and Dolly Sods likely helps that habit along, since deep snow insulates the runways from both cold and predators.
Status in West Virginia
NatureServe ranks the meadow vole S4, apparently secure, and it’s native to the state. Its scattered West Virginia records mostly trace the boundary between the Alleghenies’ open wetlands and the forest that surrounds them.
