Vermont’s occurrence databases hold just 15 records for the woodland vole, the thinnest tally among the state’s voles. That scarcity fits an animal that spends almost its entire life out of sight, underground.
A vole that lives underground, not in a grass runway
Where a meadow vole cuts surface runways through open grass, the woodland vole digs shallow tunnels through loose leaf litter and soil under forest cover, feeding on roots, tubers, and bark rather than foraging in the open. Vermont’s records for it come from the hardwood forest of the Green Mountains and Green Mountain National Forest, ground with the loose, well-drained soil this vole needs to dig through.
A thin, early-spring record set
Recorded sightings for this vole peak in April and stay low the rest of the year, a pattern that fits early spring, when snowmelt softens the soil and pushes the vole’s shallow tunnels closer to the surface where a survey is more likely to catch it. With so few records overall, a quiet month elsewhere in the state says little about where the vole is actually working underground.
Status in Vermont
NatureServe ranks the woodland vole S3, vulnerable, a notably lower rank than most of the state’s other small mammals, and it’s native to Vermont. Its underground life makes it hard to survey, so keeping intact hardwood forest with a healthy soil layer matters more than any single count of records.
