Post by farmermike on Jan 30, 2018 20:22:07 GMT -5
As I have mentioned elsewhere my local region experienced an extraordinary "plague of voles" during 2016 & 2017. I thought I would post some photos here to document the event. Hopefully this will help (or at least console) other people who have similar experiences.
In 2015, the final year of the drought in Northern California, voles did not do any visible damage. In 2016, after a mild and rainy winter, they had a population boom starting in mid-summer. In 2017, after a mild and extremely wet winter, our vole population "hit the ground running" in the spring, and destroyed maybe 90% of our fruit and vegetable crops.
The worst damage they did was girdling our youngest fruit tree. They have probably killed ~50 fruit trees over the past 2 years. Apples seemed to be their favorite. Fortunately, once the tree's trunk get to 4" in diameter, the voles don't seem to bother them.
They hit my naked-seed squash project pretty hard. In this photo from 2016, I had to harvest some pumpkins a little early just to get them out of the field and away from vole activity. As long as I kept moving them around, I could keep the voles away from them, but if I left them alone long enough this is what happened. We managed to use and sell a good number of them though.
We got almost zero watermelons at the ranch in 2017. Every time a fruit would start to form, the voles would hollow it out. In late summer, after the vole population crashed, we did finally get 4 ripe watermelons. I sure saved seeds from those "Volepocalypse Survivors"!
More photos to come.
In 2015, the final year of the drought in Northern California, voles did not do any visible damage. In 2016, after a mild and rainy winter, they had a population boom starting in mid-summer. In 2017, after a mild and extremely wet winter, our vole population "hit the ground running" in the spring, and destroyed maybe 90% of our fruit and vegetable crops.
The worst damage they did was girdling our youngest fruit tree. They have probably killed ~50 fruit trees over the past 2 years. Apples seemed to be their favorite. Fortunately, once the tree's trunk get to 4" in diameter, the voles don't seem to bother them.
They hit my naked-seed squash project pretty hard. In this photo from 2016, I had to harvest some pumpkins a little early just to get them out of the field and away from vole activity. As long as I kept moving them around, I could keep the voles away from them, but if I left them alone long enough this is what happened. We managed to use and sell a good number of them though.
We got almost zero watermelons at the ranch in 2017. Every time a fruit would start to form, the voles would hollow it out. In late summer, after the vole population crashed, we did finally get 4 ripe watermelons. I sure saved seeds from those "Volepocalypse Survivors"!
More photos to come.
