You’ve spent years cultivating a beautiful lawn and garden around your Billings home, only to wake up one morning and find mysterious trails crisscrossing your yard, dead patches appearing out of nowhere, and your favorite shrubs tilting at odd angles. If this sounds familiar, voles are likely the culprits.
These small rodents might look harmless, but they’re anything but. Voles are remarkably destructive to Montana landscaping, and once they settle in, they multiply fast. At Best Pest Control, we’ve helped countless homeowners across Billings and throughout Montana reclaim their properties from these persistent pests. In this guide, we’ll walk you through everything you need to know about vole behavior, the telltale signs of an infestation, and exactly how we eliminate these unwelcome guests from your property for good.
Understanding Voles and Their Behavior in Montana
Before we can effectively eliminate voles, it helps to understand what we’re dealing with. Voles are small, stocky rodents often mistaken for mice or moles. They typically measure 4 to 8 inches long, with short tails, small ears, and compact bodies built for burrowing.
Unlike moles, which feed primarily on insects and grubs, voles are herbivores with a voracious appetite. They feast on grass, roots, bulbs, bark, and just about any plant material they can find. This dietary preference is precisely what makes them so destructive to residential landscapes.
Montana’s climate creates ideal conditions for vole populations to flourish. Our cold winters actually work in their favor, voles remain active year-round, tunneling beneath snow cover where they’re protected from predators and the elements. This means they can continue feeding on your lawn and plants even when everything appears dormant on the surface.
Voles are also prolific breeders. A single female can produce 5 to 10 litters per year, with each litter containing 3 to 6 young. Do the math, and you’ll quickly see how a small vole problem can explode into a full-blown infestation within a single season.
We commonly encounter two species around Billings: the meadow vole and the prairie vole. Both cause similar damage, though meadow voles tend to prefer wetter areas while prairie voles are more adaptable to drier conditions. Regardless of the species, the damage they inflict on your property can be significant.
Signs of Vole Activity on Your Property
Catching a vole infestation early can save you thousands of dollars in landscape repairs. Here’s what we tell homeowners to watch for.
Surface Runways and Tunnels
The most distinctive sign of vole activity is the network of surface runways they create. These are narrow paths, usually 1 to 2 inches wide, that wind through grass and vegetation at ground level. Voles keep these runways closely cropped by constant travel and feeding, making them visible once you know what to look for.
After snowmelt in spring, you might notice these runways more clearly, they’ll appear as raised ridges or grooves crisscrossing your lawn where voles traveled beneath the snow all winter. It’s one of those frustrating “surprises” that greet Billings homeowners as the weather warms up.
Voles also create shallow burrow systems with multiple entrances, usually hidden beneath vegetation, mulch, or debris. These entrance holes are typically about 1.5 inches in diameter, and you’ll often find them near the base of trees, shrubs, or along garden borders.
Damage to Lawns and Gardens
Vole damage to lawns shows up as irregular dead patches where they’ve gnawed away at grass roots. These patches often follow the runway patterns, creating a web-like appearance of brown, dying turf throughout otherwise healthy grass.
Garden damage tends to be more obvious. You might notice plants wilting or dying suddenly, only to discover the root system has been completely destroyed below ground. Bulbs are a particular favorite, tulips, lilies, and other flowering bulbs often disappear entirely or emerge partially eaten.
Trees and shrubs suffer too. Voles gnaw on bark near the base of trunks, a behavior called girdling that can kill young trees outright. We’ve seen homeowners lose ornamental trees they’d nurtured for years to vole damage they didn’t catch in time. Leaning or unstable trees can also indicate vole activity, as root damage destabilizes the plant’s foundation.
Why Voles Thrive Around Billings Homes
Billings and the surrounding areas offer everything voles need to establish thriving colonies. Understanding these factors helps explain why professional intervention is often necessary.
First, there’s the vegetation. Residential landscapes provide abundant food sources, lush lawns, ornamental plantings, vegetable gardens, and fruit trees are essentially an all-you-can-eat buffet for hungry voles. The irrigated yards common in our semi-arid climate are particularly attractive, offering moisture and tender plant growth that voles prefer.
Second, our suburban and rural properties often feature the dense ground cover voles love. Thick mulch beds, overgrown vegetation, leaf litter, and ornamental grasses provide excellent hiding spots and nesting material. Many homeowners inadvertently create perfect vole habitat without realizing it.
Third, Montana’s agricultural areas border many Billings neighborhoods. Voles naturally inhabit grasslands and agricultural fields, and they readily move into adjacent residential properties when populations grow or food becomes scarce. Your well-maintained yard might just be the next stop on their expansion route.
Finally, natural predators are less prevalent in developed areas. Hawks, owls, foxes, and snakes all prey on voles, but these predators are less common in suburban settings. Without natural population control, vole numbers can spike dramatically.
The combination of abundant resources and reduced predation pressure means vole populations around Billings homes can grow quickly, and cause serious damage before homeowners even realize there’s a problem.
Professional Vole Elimination Methods
At Best Pest Control, we’ve developed a comprehensive approach to vole elimination that addresses both current infestations and the conditions that attract them. Here’s how we tackle vole problems for our Billings clients.
Property Inspection and Assessment
Every effective treatment starts with a thorough inspection. Our technicians walk your entire property, identifying active runways, burrow entrances, and damage patterns. We assess the extent of the infestation, locate high-activity zones, and note environmental factors contributing to the problem.
This isn’t a quick once-over. We check along fence lines, around foundations, beneath decks, in garden beds, and around the base of trees and shrubs. Voles are creatures of habit, and understanding their travel patterns is essential for effective control.
We also evaluate your landscape for factors that might be attracting or harboring voles, excessive mulch depth, overgrown areas, ground-level water sources, and other conditions that need addressing.
Targeted Trapping and Removal
Once we’ve mapped the infestation, we carry out targeted trapping strategies. We place traps directly in active runways and near burrow entrances where voles are most likely to encounter them. Strategic placement is key, random trap placement rarely produces results.
We use professional-grade equipment and techniques that homeowners typically don’t have access to. Our methods are designed to reduce vole populations quickly and humanely, with regular monitoring and trap adjustment based on activity levels.
For larger infestations, we may recommend additional control methods along with trapping. We’ll discuss all options with you and explain the pros and cons of each approach based on your specific situation.
Habitat Modification Strategies
Trapping alone won’t solve a vole problem long-term if your property still offers ideal conditions for them. That’s why habitat modification is a critical component of our approach.
We provide specific recommendations for making your property less attractive to voles. This might include reducing mulch depth around plantings, removing ground-level debris, trimming vegetation that provides cover, and creating cleared borders around gardens and high-value plantings.
We also advise on protective measures for vulnerable trees and shrubs, such as hardware cloth guards around trunks. These physical barriers can prevent girdling damage even if voles return to the area.
Preventing Future Vole Infestations
Eliminating an existing infestation is only half the battle. Keeping voles from returning requires ongoing vigilance and smart landscape management. Here’s what we recommend to our clients.
Maintain a tidy yard. Keep grass mowed regularly and remove fallen leaves, brush piles, and other debris that provide cover. Voles feel exposed in open areas and prefer properties with plenty of hiding spots.
Manage mulch carefully. While mulch benefits your plantings, excessive depth, anything over 3 inches, creates prime vole habitat. Pull mulch back from tree trunks and shrub bases, leaving a few inches of clearance.
Reduce ground cover density. Dense groundcovers and ornamental grasses near valuable plantings give voles safe travel routes. Consider creating mulch-free or gravel borders around gardens to discourage vole movement.
Protect vulnerable plants. Wrap young tree trunks with hardware cloth or plastic guards extending a few inches below ground and at least 18 inches above. For bulbs, consider planting in wire mesh baskets.
Monitor regularly. Walk your property periodically, especially in spring after snowmelt. Early detection makes control much easier and less expensive.
At Best Pest Control, we offer ongoing treatment plans designed to catch and address pest problems before they get out of hand. Regular monitoring visits can identify new vole activity early, allowing for quick intervention before significant damage occurs.
When to Call a Professional for Vole Control
Some homeowners try DIY vole control with mixed results. Store-bought traps and repellents can occasionally reduce small populations, but they rarely eliminate established infestations completely.
We recommend calling a professional when:
- You’re seeing widespread damage. Multiple dead patches, damaged plants throughout your yard, or visible runway networks indicate a population too large for DIY methods.
- DIY efforts haven’t worked. If you’ve been trapping or using repellents for several weeks without noticeable improvement, it’s time for professional help.
- Damage is affecting trees or shrubs. Girdling damage can kill valuable landscape plants quickly. Professional intervention can save plants that might otherwise be lost.
- You’re preparing to sell. Vole damage significantly impacts curb appeal. Getting the problem solved before listing protects your property value.
- You simply want it handled right. Between work, family, and everything else, most people don’t have time to become vole control experts. That’s what we’re here for.
Best Pest Control serves all of Montana, including Billings and surrounding communities. Whether you’re dealing with voles, rodents, wildlife, or any other pest problem, we have the expertise and equipment to handle it. Our team understands local conditions and knows what works in our climate and environment.
Conclusion
Voles might be small, but the damage they cause to Billings homes and landscapes is anything but minor. From dead patches in your lawn to girdled trees and destroyed gardens, these persistent rodents can undo years of landscaping work in a single season.
The good news? Vole problems are solvable. With professional assessment, targeted removal strategies, and smart habitat modifications, we can eliminate voles from your property and help keep them from returning.
At Best Pest Control, we’ve built our reputation on tackling pest problems quickly and thoroughly, because we know they only get worse if left unchecked. If you’re seeing signs of vole activity around your Billings home, don’t wait for the damage to escalate. Contact us today to schedule an inspection. We’ll assess your situation, explain your options, and get to work protecting your property from these destructive pests.
Whether it creeps or crawls, Best Pest Control has you covered.