Voles

Yesterday a friend came over to buy one of my wonderful pieces of beekeeping for which I no longer have any use.

While talking we looked at a devastated section of my once equally wonderful bearded iris collection, which for the last two years has been undergoing sytematic destruction by voles.

Until I few years ago I didn't know what voles were. They are, as you would expect, underground little animals at about the same size as moles but more mouselike. But moles have the great virtue that they build all those tunnels through your garden looking for Japanese Beetle grubs. Voles, on the other hand, like to eat your Iris rhizomes, your tulip bulbs, your lily bulbs, your tiny tree saplings, and other things whose flowering or fruiting days you've been looking forward to with great anticipation.

The friend said that in the process of trying to start a small orchard he had fought a losing battle with voles. He tried mouse traps and many other means, but nothing worked. Finally he asked an old nursery owner, and this man offered a simple but apparently effective solution. He said, "Stop feeding your cats."

Just two hours later, if that, as if he had been listening, Beauty, our lone cat, barged into our sunroom from outside, while making a loud noise. Too late I realized that the noise was like one you would expect to hear from a cat complaining loudly about an undesirable colleague trespassing on the premises or that he is in unbearable anguish, but in Beauty's case that cry is really his way of announcing to us and to the world that he has just made another great kill. And too late I also saw that he had something in his mouth. I quickly ordered him out, and he did, just as quickly, but only after first dropping his mouthful on the sunroom floor -- a dead vole.

I was here in the country for years before I even heard of voles. A little later i heard about what they could do, and a little after that I experienced firsthand their ravages.

That makes me smile anew at the warnings I got from certain people in the city, before moving here, about the bears, mountain lions, and other large animals that were waiting to "get" me. But I have found that, while the bears are indeed walking around and have in fact paid me a few visits, the real terrors of the wild animal kingdom around here are the tinies, the field mice and the voles.

It's no wonder that -- after that king-sized asteroid crashed into the Yucatan shoreline 65 million years ago and wiped out all the dinosaurs and everything else of that ilk -- the little beasty mammals hiding under the tree stumps came through just fine, and they went on to become the ancestors not only of ourselves but also of a species more faithful to them and who are now happily doing a Chixilub trip on my irises.