It happens every spring after a year with average snowfall: The snow melts, your dormant lawn is exposed, and it looks like something has burrowed all over the place. In many cases, it looks like someone left a garden hose laying around the yard all season and then removed it, leaving a tunnel meandering through the lawn. Concentrated areas of tunneling will have tufts of dead grass.

This is the result of vole feeding. Voles are rodents which are closely related to moles. The big difference is that their damage occurs almost exclusively above ground, at least on lawns.

Voles live in stone walls, burrows in mulch beds, and other such places. They feed year round. They’ll feed on flower bulbs, tree bark and, when the snow cover affords them protection from predators such as hawks, owls, foxes, etc., they’ll venture out into the lawn, feeding as they go and leaving the telltale meandering “tunnels”.

Once the snowpack disappears and cover is gone, they’ll be much less active in the open lawn areas. However, the mess they can leave can be alarming! It often appears that the damage is beyond the ability of the lawn to repair itself.

The good news is that, most of the time, the lawn will recover on its own. The reason is that the voles mostly feed on the dead shoots of grass from the prior season. Even if they get into the growing tissue, which is often frozen into the ground, their tunnels are so narrow that the surrounding grass plants will grow into it and close it up once rapid growth resumes.

How to help vole damage to recover:

Don’t panic! Your lawn looks its absolute worst when it comes out from under the snow. It’s brown, matted, and wet. Let it dry before you do anything to it. It’s in a delicate state and it’s easy to do further damage to it.
Once it’s dried out, take a leaf rake and lightly rake up any tufts of dead grass.
Be patient! Once the lawn starts its rapid growth, most of this damage will often disappear by late May.
Once late May rolls around, you’ll probably find even the most concentrated areas of feeding that you noticed in March/April are much smaller and still on their way to recovery. Remember that lawns will heal themselves more quickly than seed will blend in. Any patch seeding will, most likely, not be the exact same grass type as the surrounding areas and may stand out even after the new grass has matured.

While voles may remain active in the lawn throughout the season, their damage will often heal quickly. We wish we could offer a cost-effective solution to this problem, but we can’t. There are products that claim to be effective but we don’t recommend them.