The Lowly Little Meadow Vole
A Vole is not a Mole; he does live in a hole. It may be a matter of opinion, but I think that my Meadow Voles are cuter than that Micky fella, besides which my Voles don't wear silly big shoes; but there are a lot more than one of them. In fact, the Vole isn't really related to the mouse at all, their closest relation is the lemming. The reason I bring this up is obvious, many people have mistaken a Vole for a Mole, or a friend of Mickey's. They are in fact a stout, hairy, short furry-tailed, little amazing reproducer that lives in burrows in the ground, or in winter under the snow in tunnels.
A Vole doesn't have that mousy little nose that gets into things in your home, they live in my yard, and all over the cooler sides of the Wind River Canyon, here in Wonderful Wyoming. There are over 150 different species of Vole on our planet! They can grow to nine inches long and are active day or night. Meadow Voles have different teeth than a mouse; they eat seeds, roots, bark and other vegan products in my sod, but they do sometimes eat carrion; like sometimes I go to Mickey D's.
A Vole has a family life and a reproductive cycle that is truly unrivaled among mammals, and the only thing that I think reproduces like this are bugs. In a study I just read, one captive female Vole had seventeen litters in a year! with total of 83 little Voles! One of her female kids had 13 litters and 78 baby Voles, before she was a year old! The females will reach sexual maturity in less than a month, and have 5 to 10 litters in a year on average. Have you started doing the math yet?
A Vole burrow community, under the ground, will have upwards of fifteen hundred individuals per acre, and a reproductive cycle that shames even the rabbit. So where do all the Meadow Voles in the Wind River Canyon go? They are food for a variety of hungry wild animals that live in Wyoming, let me list just a few - falcons, hawks, owls, coyotes, ermine, weasels, snakes, mink, magpies, crows, Great Blue Herons, badgers, foxes, and bobcats, and wolves; to name but a few.
A Vole is food for nearly everyone it seems; the Micky D's of the wild edible community. They can be destructive to our food crops, and have been poisoned as a result. And they sometimes move at lightning speeds, I know, because I used to use them as target practice to sharpen my eye; now I shoot them with cameras! which is more difficult. Which brings me to this week's new photograph, my two little Meadow Voles.
Some of our wild birds like cracked corn, some birdseed or sunflower seeds. Which to my sharp little eyes, I noticed yesterday, a couple of the Voles "raiding" the bird's kitchen. I knew I wasn't going to get very close to these "food for everyone" wild animals, so I grabbed the "long" lens camera and spent time in the melting snow. When the two of them, that obviously were related, came out of their tunnel in the snow, I knew I had something fun to work in my digital darkroom.
The best RAW files, more than sixty of them total, were first worked in Canon's supplied software, Digital Photo Professional. Which by the way, is a terrific software for the creative person that doesn't need or want to spend a fortune. I then touched up the 16-bit TIFF file with Adobe Lightroom 5.7, as I always do for a more professional looking photograph, and so I can add metadata to the file. Metadata, for those that don't know, are basically descriptive words hidden in the digital files of photographs. And there you have it, all in the days work of a wildlife photographer, and the pay? Sunshine, baby............
Thank you for reading my blog this week, and remember what I preach; "Keep your camera ready." Stay warm, and until next Saturday, don't scare the wild animals.
Writing and photography by Michael John Balog - Hogbats Photography - Wind River Canyon - Wyoming.