Living With Voles

At first I thought the voles were kind of cute. A couple would get into the trash can where we keep our birdseed and get stuck, and I would scoop them out in the morning and release them outside the front door. Mrs Vache Folle is anti-rodent, however, except for grey squirrels and chipmunks, and freaked out about having vermin in our house. She really started going nuts about the voles when they started coming into the kitchen and getting into the drawers and cabinets. They would poop on our silverware and gnaw on wooden spoons and anything made of cork. They noshed on dog food and left their scat everywhere.

They even got into the chest of drawers where we kept our mittens and scarves and such like and chewed some of these to shreds and pooped on everything else. We tried plugging up their suspected route of ingress but failed to stop them. We went to the feed store to get traps, but the merchant told us that voles won’t go in traps or eat poison. Our exterminator came by and told us that the only thing we could do would be to put down those traps with glue on them in the basement and cubby. We couldn’t put them inside because the dogs might get stuck on them. We balked at this because of our squeamish and tenderhearted natures. Sure, the voles are annoying, but we don’t want to torture them to death on glue pads.

Then the voles got into our cars and started chewing the floor mats and crapping in the glove box. I began to rethink the glue traps. We had Steve the contractor plug up the likely vole pathways into the house, and this morning there were no vole turds to be seen in any of the usual places. I’m keeping my fingers crossed and hoping that they have been blocked. Now we’ve got to figure out how they are getting into our cars and figure out how to stop them.

Mrs VF reckons the voles are getting revenge for our cleaning out the shed where they had been nesting. I don’t like to attribute such motives to dumb animals, but our problem did seem to start after the shed cleaning. Mrs VF talked about getting a cat, but I reckon that (a) Jesse the Carpathian would eat it and (b) that would just be substituting a larger animal that craps in the house for smaller animals that crap in the house.

In other wildlife news, I am please to report that the great blue heron has not yet eaten all our fish. Two comets have survived along with a school of shiners that I thought had been wiped out last year. The heron comes by every day, so it may be just a matter of time before the last two comets buy the farm.