5 Ways to Get Rid of Voles in the Bay Area

Voles, sometimes called meadow mice, include the California vole (scientific name Microtus californicus), a species found throughout much of coastal California, including the San Francisco Bay Area.

They’re some of the most prolific and numerous mammals in North America, and also some of the hardest outdoor pests to get rid of.

Voracious eaters, they destroy even large trees and shrubs in just days.

They also reproduce rapidly – every 45 days, a single female could give birth to 5–10 litters per year, with 3–6 young per litter.

Like mice, voles are small creatures – with chunky bodies about 5–8 inches long. They have short tails and small, furred ears. They tend to be brown, with dark gray bellies and brown feet.

They can be easily distinguished from moles, which are much larger and have clawed front feet, and shrews, which are smaller and more slender.

“Voles also feed on the bark of trees, so any trees planted can be killed by a two-inch-long field mouse over time. We see it all the time.” – Zachary Smith, founder of Smith’s Pest Management.

Voles are attracted to yards that provide them with food, water, and shelter.

Here are a few things that may attract voles to your property:

• Food sources: Voles are primarily herbivores, and they feed on various plant species, including grasses, weeds, and seeds. They’re also surprisingly voracious eaters for their size, consuming bark and shrubs and even killing whole trees.
• Moisture: Voles need adequate moisture to survive, so they infest outdoor areas with ponds, streams, and other wet spaces. In the Bay Area, regularly irrigated lawns and gardens are especially attractive to voles during California’s dry summer months.
• Shelter: Since voles are small prey animals, they need to seek shelter to stay safe from predators. Tall grass, ivy, ornamental ground cover, thick mulch, and other landscaping are ideal places to take cover. Properties bordering grasslands, agricultural fields, or undeveloped hillsides, such as those in Los Gatos, Almaden Valley, Morgan Hill, and Danville, offer plenty of food for them.

Voles can destroy lawns, yards, and gardens. According to our founder, Zachary Smith, a licensed pest control professional, “Voles eat meadow grass voraciously and will create Swiss-cheese-like damage in your lawn and garden. If you don’t get rid of voles, they will destroy your landscaping.”

Here are a few ways they can destroy your outdoor space.

• Damage to gardens and landscaping. They love to chew the vulnerable stems of young trees and woody ornamental plants, causing severe damage and dieback.
• Damage to the turf. Voles also cause considerable turf damage, which most homeowners discover in the spring.
• Runways in the lawn. In California, homeowners may notice the “runways” that indicate a vole infestation throughout the year, especially in areas with dense grass and vegetation. These runways are about the width of a golf ball and look like grooves in the grass surface. Often, they have small holes all along the pathway. They form when voles feed on the turf canopy. They also leave layers of excrement along the runways and wear down the grass surface with their foot traffic.
• Damage to growing plants. As voles feed in these “runways,” they chew plants down to the growing point at ground level, impeding later plant growth.

Voles can breed year-round, with their breeding activity typically peaking in spring. Winter and spring rainfall help the grass and vegetation grow, offering food and shelter. During California’s dry summer months, irrigated lawns and gardens can continue to provide green vegetation.

Inspect your yards regularly, especially in late winter and spring, and watch for fresh runways, burrow openings, and damage to garden plants or young trees throughout the year.

The size of your yard can affect vole control costs, but how big the infestation is matters just as much. A small garden with a few active runways may require less work than a large lawn with widespread damage.

The number of active runways, severity of plant damage, and treatments needed are all factors that influence the cost. At Smith’s Pest Management, we take all these things in mind during an inspection to recommend an appropriate treatment plan and provide a quote based on your property’s needs.

Holes alone don’t necessarily mean you’re dealing with voles. Look at the shape of the trails. Voles create shallow, open pathways through grass. Moles, on the other hand, tunnel just beneath the surface, leaving raised ridges in the lawn. Gophers generally stay underground, leaving piles of excavated soil rather than visible surface trails.

If you only see holes without connecting trails, they may have been made by another animal. A professional inspection can help identify the animal responsible for the damage.

Here are a few sure-fire signs of voles in your yard:

• Paths 1”-2” wide and about 1” deep in the turf surface.
• Vole burrows look like holes in the lawn or around the bases of trees. Unlike molehills, these dens do not feature soil mounding.
• Spaces where the grass of the lawn is suddenly very short.
• Noticeable gnaw marks on the stems of woody plants and young trees.
• Exposed stems that have been gnawed to a pointed tip.
• Dead plants that, when lifted, have no root structure remaining.

Since voles multiply rapidly, producing 5-10 litters each year with an average of five young per litter, vole populations can quickly spiral out of control.

With this in mind, it’s important to act quickly to control voles.

We recommend contacting a professional pest management company like Smith’s at the first sign of a vole infestation in your yard.

The answer to this question depends on which method you use. For example, if you’ve chosen to set live traps, you can expect to spend about 3-4 weeks reducing your vole population.

If you prefer to hire a professional pest control service for vole control, you’ll see much faster results.

At Smith’s Pest Management, our vole removal services include inspecting your property, identifying active runways, and using targeted treatments to control the infestation and protect your lawn and garden.

Voles are not a physical threat to people, but they can spread disease.

When voles urinate or defecate on your property, they can introduce parasites and diseases like salmonellosis, leptospirosis, and Machupo virus.

Many of these rodent-borne pathogens are transmissible to people and domestic pets.

While the names sound similar, voles and moles are not the same animals, and there are some significant differences between voles and gophers. Although all of these animals make tunnels in your yard, they have different traits. Here’s a breakdown:

Voles

Voles look like field mice. They are small rodents with round, compact bodies, short tails, ears that lie close to their bodies, and small eyes. They’re typically about 5-8 inches long and have large teeth to gnaw plant stems and roots.

Voles are known for their tendency to dig. They make tunnels in the soil and create golf ball-sized exit holes in existing mole tunnels. Voles eat plants.

Like many other rodents, they enjoy a vegetarian diet, gnawing away at the stems of plants and grass blades. Their tunnels tend to be near the surface of a garden or yard because of their preferred food sources.

When voles are on your property, you may notice previously healthy plants keeled over with their roots chewed off. Once voles establish a colony, they breed quickly, so controlling the spread is essential.

Moles

Unlike voles, moles are not rodents. Instead, they’re small mammals that spend much of their lives underground, digging tunnels.

They’re 4-7 inches long with large, paddle-shaped feet and prominent claws that help them move soil.

Their distinctly shaped heads and snouts are elongated, with small eyes and no external ears.

Their bodies are covered in dense, brown-gray fur that has no grain. This allows the mole to move quickly in all directions underground.

Moles are prolific diggers. They’re known for creating volcano-shaped hills in lawns and garden soil. According to the Home & Garden Information Center at Clemson University’s Cooperative Extension:

[Mole] tunnels are dug at a rate of 18 feet per hour. Moles can add 150 feet of new tunnels in the lawn each day. Moles are expert diggers that will consume up to 60 to 100% of their body weight in insects, grubs, and earthworms each day. This equates to a 5-ounce mole eating 50 pounds of its prey in a year.

While moles, like voles, tunnel in gardens, it’s a misconception that they do so to eat the roots of plants. Instead, they target earthworms that live in the garden soil.

If moles are damaging your garden, hire professional mole control services to stop the cycle, or read about how to get rid of them here.

Gophers

Gophers are burrowing rodents with medium-sized bodies that range from 5-14” long, which makes them larger than either voles or moles. Built for an underground life, gophers spend most of their time digging burrows in gardens and lawns and pushing the dirt they excavate up to the surface. While moles make volcano-shaped mounds, the mounds gophers create are characteristically horseshoe-shaped.

Gophers eat roots, plants, and tubers and are known to pull complete vegetation into their burrows from below, quickly destroying gardens and ornamental landscaping.

If voles have damaged your lawn, you want to restore it quickly.

Here are a few quick tips:

• Start by identifying the extent of the vole damage – inspect your entire lawn for signs of vole activity, such as tunnels, burrow holes, and damaged or destroyed plants.
• Remove debris and attractants that may be keeping voles around. This includes dead plant material, wood piles, and damaged plants.
• If voles have damaged the plants in your yard, focus on treating them to encourage new growth. This may mean trimming or pruning the plants or treating them with a fungicide or insecticide to prevent future vole damage.
• Give the entire lawn surface a gentle rake to break up debris and excrement in vole runways and promote lawn growth.
• Fill in vole tunnels, burrow holes, and pathways with topsoil. Tamp the soil down firmly to prevent voles from returning to these holes.
• Fertilize and overseed any areas of thin or chewed-down grass.
• Prune and fertilize trees or shrubs that voles have gnawed on.
• Assess the entire lawn and modify the vole habitat wherever possible. This means reducing available cover and food sources in the area and making the space less attractive to voles and other pests.

If you have severe vole damage in your lawn, hire a professional company that offers turf and ornamental treatments.

We offer both per-visit vole control and ongoing maintenance options. Which approach is right for your case depends on your property’s size and the extent of the infestation.

Trapping in one location may not address voles using other runways. If activity is widespread or keeps returning, we may recommend recurring maintenance. 

During your inspection, we’ll explain how many visits are recommended, what’s included in your quote, and whether ongoing maintenance is appropriate for your property.

Not all vole treatments are completely non-toxic. Depending on the infestation, we may use targeted trapping, bait stations, and carbon monoxide injection.

Trapping avoids chemical pesticides, but precautions are still necessary. Our technicians cover and mark traps to help prevent children, pets, and other animals from coming into contact with them.

If you have children, pets, or a vegetable garden, let us know before treatment so we can consider these factors when creating a plan.

Our follow-up visits depend on your vole control service plan. Our technicians return as needed to check traps, remove captured voles, and monitor for new activity.

Our recurring pest control services include a satisfaction guarantee, and when appropriate, we also offer complimentary follow-up visits. However, our published 30-day warranty applies specifically to one-time gopher and mole treatments, not necessarily vole control.

After treatment, if you see fresh vole runways, contact our team to review your service agreement and determine whether additional visits are included or billed separately.

Look for a licensed pest control company that has experience treating California voles and understands local landscaping conditions. This local expertise matters because vole activity can vary depending on irrigation, vegetation, and how close it is to grassy fields or open spaces.

Smith’s Pest Management provides professional vole control services throughout the San Francisco Bay Area and Central Coast. Contact our team with your ZIP code so we can confirm service availability in your area and connect you with the closest available technician.

At Smith’s Pest Management, professional vole control typically costs $150–300per visit, depending on your property size and the extent of the problem. Larger yards, multiple active runway systems, and severe infestations may require additional treatment visits.

If you need ongoing protection, we offer a Pest Protection Plan, typically costing $250–350per month. This includes regular inspections, trapping active voles, and monitoring for new activity to help prevent further damage.

We also offer free inspections and customized quotes, so you can understand the recommended treatment and expected costs before getting started.