Michigan’s woodland vole file holds just two records from 2000 onward, both from July: one in Kalkaska County and one at the University of Michigan Biological Station in Cheboygan County, both in the northern Lower Peninsula. Older records, from before 2000, clustered instead in Berrien County in the far southwest corner, up against Indiana, the warm, forested fringe where you’d expect a woodland animal at the northern edge of its range to slip into the state.
The calendar adds its own caution: the most recent Michigan record dates to 2016. For an animal that hides under forest litter and almost never shows itself, a quiet decade may mean nobody trapped in the right woods, or it may mean genuine scarcity. The record can’t settle that.
NatureServe ranks the species S3, vulnerable, in Michigan. The southwest corner, with the state’s mildest climate and oldest forest cover, is where a fresh survey would logically start.
