Poisoning moles for plant damage
Moles are insectivores. They do not eat your plants. The animal eating your plants is using the mole's tunnels.
What it is
Baiting or gassing moles in response to plants being eaten or trees being girdled — damage that is nearly always caused by voles.
The numbers
- Moles eat grubs and earthworms. They are insectivores and are not equipped to eat roots or bark.
- Voles are rodents and do. They girdle young trees under mulch and snow and eat roots and tubers from below.
- Voles readily use the tunnel systems moles dig, which is why the two get blamed as one.
- The tells: raised ridges and volcano-shaped mounds with plants untouched = mole. Small gnaw marks on bark, missing roots, golf-ball-sized holes with no mound = vole.
Why it's here
It's the cleanest case of mistaken identity in pest control, and it costs people a season every time: they kill the moles, the damage continues, and they conclude nothing works.
The catch
For voles, the fixes are physical and cheap: hardware cloth cylinders around trunks, set an inch or two into the soil, and — the big one — pull mulch back 6 inches from every trunk. Mulch piled against bark is a covered feeding tunnel, and it is the most common way people kill their own young fruit trees without ever seeing the animal. Mow the orchard floor going into winter; cover is the whole habitat. And an owl box beats everything in a bottle.