Any gardener and just a person who likes to dig in his dacha is aware that a lot of mice live in his garden or garden. One of them is the vole. This mouse is distributed all over the world, and still continues to amaze scientists with some features of its behavior.
Like moles in this respect, they dig deep holes. But unlike them, in voles, the entrance to the dwelling is on the side, in the dump of the earth. In addition, their mounds themselves are much more gentle.
Among other things, all their moves have several entrances and exits at once. Only one passage can stretch for 25-30 meters, located at a depth of up to 0.4 m.
There are numerous nesting chambers in which vole offspring are born. This mouse is so prolific that in especially good seasons it sometimes fills the fields.
And no wonder: in a good year for her, one female breeds eight litters, each of which has six cubs! A simple calculation: if there are not enough predators, then out of five individuals of voles, 8.5 thousand adult mice can be obtained. And it's forseason! As you can see, the vole is a mouse prone to rapid reproduction.
She spends all day in her hiding place, daring to surface only in the evening. By the way, what does a vole mouse eat? It feeds mainly on vegetable food, causing real hatred among agricultural producers. A colony of these rodents causes great damage to the fields, eating several tons of high-quality grain a year!
It should be noted that these mice are real "gourmets" who will never drag bad food into their hole. Often they find pantries of these animals, in which up to several kilograms of qualitatively selected grain of wheat, rye and oats are stored.
The peculiarity of voles is not only in a fast metabolism (like other rodents), but also in the rapid growth of teeth: in order to grind them down, the animal must constantly gnaw something. During the day, only one animal eats food, the weight of which is equal to its own weight.
Any vole is a mouse that gardeners especially “love”. The fact is that they are active even in winter. In need of food, voles cleanly gnaw the lower parts of tree trunks, causing them to simply die.
Distinguishing this animal from an ordinary gray mouse is easy: it has a much more pleasant color and a short tail. Prolonged rains, as well as sudden and severe winter thaws, are especially dangerous for voles. Burrows are flooded, in winter the water freezes in them, depriving the rodents of food, shelter and warmth.
Very important in the regulation of their numberspopulation of birds of prey. The average owl in one year alone can eat up to one and a half thousand voles. All foxes, martens, ferrets and weasels generally prefer to eat only them. Weasel, for example, can eat up to 20 well-fed mice in one day. In addition, mustelids can sneak right into their burrows, as the body structure allows them to make their way through long and narrow tunnels.
Note that as a result of the thoughtless use of pesticides and poisons, mice die, but not all of them. Poisoned, they are eaten by owls and predatory mammals, whose mortality just reaches 100%.
As a result, surviving mice increase their numbers tenfold in just a couple of months. The result is a real ecological disaster, the responsibility for which is not the vole mouse (the photo of which is in the article), but the person.
