Pennsylvania’s occurrence records list 73 sightings of the southern red-backed vole, enough to call it an occasional find rather than a genuinely rare one, though still a thin trail for an animal that spends most of its life under leaf litter.
A forest-floor specialist, not a farmland one
The state’s records for this vole concentrate in mature, damp forest tracts rather than open country: Allegheny National Forest on the Appalachian Plateau in the northwest, the old-growth hemlock stands of Ricketts Glen State Park farther east on that same plateau, and the ridge forests around Delaware Water Gap where the Ridge-and-Valley country meets New Jersey. It’s essentially missing from the farm-dominated Piedmont in the state’s south, because this vole needs the kind of moss, deadwood, and thick leaf litter that working farmland doesn’t grow.
Eating what the forest floor grows
This vole feeds mostly on fungi, digging out underground truffles and picking through mushrooms and lichens, and rounds that out with seeds and green shoots. It doesn’t hibernate. Through a Pennsylvania winter it tunnels under snow and leaf litter instead, staying active in a layer most people never see. That fungus-heavy diet also makes it one of the forest’s quieter gardeners, spreading fungal spores through the soil wherever it digs.
Status in Pennsylvania
Pennsylvania treats the southern red-backed vole as native, and NatureServe ranks it S5, secure, at the state level. It isn’t listed as nonindigenous by USGS, consistent with a species tucked into the damp understory of the state’s older forests.
Full species profile
