Voles, field mice, are among my favorite animals.
My dad (Ted) used to read Beatrix Potter to my sister and me. Actually, he retold the stories in his own way and only occasionally referred to the illustrations. Somehow, Beatrix Potter’s English Lake District was transported to the fields and gardens of the Waschke Homestead. And the field mice, Dad never called them voles, were prominent characters. Dad did not have anything to say about house mice; they were pests in the barn, and he was happy to see the cats catch and eat them.
In Dad’s stories, field mice had names, characters, families, and adventures. He told gentle stories. Brave little field mice narrowly escaping marauding owls, rescued by their mouse parents. Field mice falling into holes and struggling to escape. Field mice outwitting a clever red fox crouching in hiding next to a succulent cache of tender roots. Field mice going out in the snow and catching a chill that had to be treated with hot foot baths and chamomile tea. Field mice meeting wise old chickens. Where my father ever got the idea that a chicken might be wise, I don’t know.
Voles are a separate species from house and wood mice with different diets and habits. The variety that lives on the Waschke Homestead is much larger than house mice—sometimes five inches long, plump, with longer hair, shorter tails, and never venture far from open fields. The hay and grain fields, offering cover for their labyrinthine trails and nests, teemed with them. Corn and potato fields were too open for field mice and the cows in the pastures trampled and destroyed field mouse kingdoms. But the hay and grain fields left the field mice undisturbed for months at a time and they flourished there.
The owls, foxes, barn cats, and coyotes all knew where the field mice lived. After sunset and in the early morning before sunrise, the owls fly over, and other predators nose around in the field mouse trails and dine well on field mice fattened on grass and other plants that grew in the fields.
Field mice skulls appear in owl pellets in the barn. The owls swallow the mice bones and all, then cough up the indigestible parts as pellets when they roost in the barn. The pellets litter the floor of the hay barn and the silo now. The contents of the pellets are fascinating. Jake and Monica captured the harsh beauty of a field mouse skull from an owl pellet in the photo above.
Field mice are terrifyingly prolific. A fertile female produces four or five offspring a month, who mature in a few weeks. Without the predators the field mouse population would soon run out of food. Relying on the natural curbs on their proliferation, Dad never worried about field mice affecting his crops and I don’t believe they ever did.
Hay cutting and grain harvesting was a terror for field mice. When we cut hay with a sickle cutter bar mower, in areas where the field mouse population was high, the cutting bar laid their nests and trails open to the sky and the sickle would drip with deep red field mouse blood. The disk mowers that are generally used now disperse the blood in an invisible blur.
The field mouse slaughter was also a dangerous time for cats. They liked to hunt close to the mowing, waiting to catch mice fleeing from the cutter. A cat’s instincts are not tuned to mowers cutting hay and sometimes they dive into the path of the mower instead of away. Every year or so, we’d lose a good cat to the mower.
As the field was cut, mice would run to the tall grass remaining in the center of the field, a patch that got smaller with each round of the mower. During the last few passes, the patch of tall grass in the center would rustle with fleeing field mice.