Moles vs. Voles: Who Is Ruining Your Lawn?

You look out at your perfect lawn and it looks like a scene from WWI. Trenches, holes, mounds of dirt.

Before you go buy a trap, you need to know if it starts with an M or a V.

The Mole (The Carnivore)

• The Diet: Worms, grubs, insects. They don't eat plants.
• The Damage: Volcano-shaped mounds of dirt pushing up from below. Raised ridges where they tunneled just under the surface.
• The Myth: "Kill the grubs and the moles will leave." False. Moles actually prefer earthworms. If you kill the grubs, they just dig harder to find worms.

The Vole (The Vegetarian)

• The Diet: Roots, bulbs, tree bark. They kill your flowers.
• The Damage: No mounds. Instead, you see "runways"—paths of trampled grass on the surface, usually about 2 inches wide. They look like little highways.
• The Fix: Voles are rodents (like mice). You can trap them with peanut butter. Moles are not rodents; they won't touch peanut butter.

How to Trap a Mole

Trapping moles is an art. You can't use bait. You have to use a scissor-trap that sits inside their tunnel.

Find an active tunnel (step on it, if it's raised again the next day, it's active). Place the trap there. It intercepts them as they commute to work.