Voles, often referred to as meadow mice or field mice, are small mouse-like rodents. They are brownish with dense fur and have short tails and small ears. Even though they are common and are active day and night year-round, they are seldom seen. There are 25 kinds of voles in the United States. Two occur in Oklahoma, and both are found in eastern Oklahoma. They are the prairie vole and the pine vole. Despite the name, pine voles are rarely found in pines but occur in deciduous woods and are often referred to as woodland voles.
The head and body length for both is 3½–5 inches; the pine vole has a tail that is half as long as that of the prairie vole. Voles make tunnels near the surface of the ground. They also make above-ground narrow runways in the grass. Vole tunnels are not noticeable, unlike mole tunnels that raise the ground. The names mole and vole are so similar it is easy to confuse them.
Moles are insectivores, and they eat insects, grubs, and earthworms, whereas voles are herbivores, and their diet consists of roots, grasses, and seeds. While voles live above and below ground, moles spend their lives underground.
During mating, nearly all voles are polygamous or promiscuous. Only two are monogamous, the pine vole and the prairie vole, the two that are found in Oklahoma. They exhibit pair bonding and mate for life.
Tom Curtis, a retired faculty member of OSU’s Center for Health Sciences in Tulsa, studied pair-bonding behavior in prairie voles for many years. He maintained a colony of prairie voles in his lab and has shown that some of the social bonding behavior in prairie voles had implications for autism.
Pine voles are also used in behavioral studies, but they are not as easy to maintain, and they have smaller litters. Both male and female prairie voles share nest-building duties and help to raise the young. With other voles, only the females raise the young.
