Caution: Photos of a dead animal are on this page.
Often mistaken for mice, moles or even sometimes rats, voles are little gray rodents that thrive in suburban backyards. While there are many species, 40 I think, of voles, in western Pennsylvania the predominant species are meadow and woodland voles. Meadow voles are the more prolific of the two, and I have pictures here of a dead meadow vole from our backyard. We didn’t kill the animal, at least not that we’re aware of, but we did find it soon after this green house fly on the vole did.
From Cornell:
Meadow voles occur throughout most of the northern and eastern United States and Canada in low wetlands, open grasslands, and orchards. Meadow voles are most active above the ground, as evidenced by surface trails often littered with droppings and grass cuttings in the ground vegetation where they live. They sometimes live underground where the soil has been cultivated or where a burrow system is already present.
Pine voles live throughout the eastern half of the United States and favor open woodlands and orchards. Pine voles spend much of their time in underground burrows and usually have an extensive subsurface trail system that is excavated about 3 to 5 cm (1 to 2 in.) deep. These burrows open to the surface and often connect to above-ground runways.
Voles eat plants, usually plant roots and will damage your lawn and your garden. They used to be controlled to a large extent by owls, but due to DDT and other toxic pesticide use, owl populations have been decimated in western Pennsylvania. So, western Pennsylvania has a lot more voles than it used to.
We tolerate them in our backyard, even though they consume our entire root vegetable crop every year. We’ve heard a bunch of old wives’ tales about getting rid of them. My favorite of these is to stick a piece of Juicy Fruit chewing gum along their “runways” in the grass. This should in short order “gum up” their works, or so we’ve been told.
For identification purposes, these animals are about the size of to a little larger than a field mouse. They are grey with short, largely hairless tails. They have a long pointy nose and tiny eyes. Their claws are long and pronounced. It’s clear from looking at them that they do a lot of digging. Pine voles are more brown to cinnamon, slightly smaller than meadow voles, and have more pronounced eyes.
In these photographs, notice the house fly on the vole. That should give you a good visual key to the vole’s size.
The animal in the pictures is not a vole. It is a shrew. You can tell by the dark teeth and the shape of the head. Shrews are primarily insectivorous as opposed to voles, which are primarily herbivorous.
I believe your photos show a pine or woodland vole, Microtis pinetorum, and not a shrew or meadow vole. I base this on the following: it has the long lower incisors of a rodent, and a short tail, so it is not a shrew (Sorex spp.). It has a pointed shout, short gray fur, and lacks conspicuous eyes and ears, so it not a meadow vole (M. pennsylvanicus). I have recently caught many of both species of voles, and have found it difficult to find an accurate illustration of the pine vole to confirm identification. Even the American Society of Mammalogists’ scientific description of the pine vole mistakenly pictures a meadow vole!
Please disregard my earlier posting – I screwed up! Your photos show a short-tailed shrew, Blarina brevicauda, so Ms Sullivan is right. This winter I have caught 29 of these animals under my bird feeders, thinking they were pine voles (which damage our garden plants). I just checked the preserved skull of one of them more closely and see that it is indeed a shrew. Now that the shrews have become scarce, I’ve started catching pine voles. It’s reassuring to know that the Am. Society of Mammalogists did not err after all!