Are you watching the voles in your life or the owls?

The voles are digging holes all over the swake.  I have never seen a vole, thank goodness.  They live underground and dig their tunnels at night.  In the morning we wake up to fresh mounds of dirt punctuating the lowlands of the swake.  We have tried traps to no avail.  The voles have sprung the traps and escaped being caught.  So far, the voles have outwitted the humans.

We have read whatever we could find to educate ourselves and determine a vole strategy.  When you live in the country you have to accept that creatures live on your doorstep.  Correction, you live on the doorstep of the creatures.  Poor voles probably held a community focus group when we arrived to clear trees and dig a big basement hole.  I imagine they weren't too impressed when a German Shepherd joined the commune and began digging into their burrows.  

As the vole population surged the owls appeared.  Although I wasn't a vole fan, the owls intrigued me.  Their wingspan was nearly a metre across. The sound of their calls in the dark was hauntingly beautiful. We were able to watch a pair of Northern Hawk Owls that lived in the tree line nearby. The more I saw of the owls, the less the voles bothered me.  Sometimes you have to put up with varmints in order to experience something else that is amazing.  Nature, like life, has a way of balancing itself out; we just need to be patient and enjoy the owls for now.  

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