Mice, Voles, Moles, And Shrews, OH MY!

Funny how sometimes think you know is wrong.   I thought I was identifying some lawn rodents correctly for years, but now I'm not as certain.  

I know what a mole looks like without much doubt, so I can kind of not worry about mistaken identity there.  They are simply bigger, have almost invisible eyes, and large paws.  I have a few around (Marley caught one once), but not many.  They tend to stay in their tunnels and leave and occasional, well, "molehill".  They eat only underground grubs and worms.  I begrudge them the worms (which I love for soil health) but applaud their taste for grubs.  They do have a side effect I will mention later.

So my problem is mice, voles, and shrews.  I forgot about shrews.  It's like when you have a lot of squirrels, you don't always notice the chipmunks.  So, after reading some articles of the differences between mice and voles, I thought I could tell them apart mostly through feeding habits and habitats.

Mice are not a real problem to a gardener.  They live above ground (though nest in small burrows).  They mostly just eat fallen flowerseeds.  And easy to identify by their long tails, prominent hairless ears, and plump round bodies.  If they get into the house, they are easy to control.  Cats and (in tight places like under the oven) traps take care of any invaders

So I thought that left just the voles.  And it made sense.  Voles use mole tunnels where available or dig their own near the surface.  They eat plant roots below-ground and stems at ground level.  They have short tails like moles but they are smaller.  They seldom invade houses (no plant roots to eat).  And the images I saw years ago seemed to show them as slender, chisel-toothed, and small-eared (as is suitable for travelling through tunnel).  And the little rodents that the cats brought up on the deck (for play or as "gifts" to me) matched that description perfectly.  

But as I decided to post about the little evil things, I looked at pictures of voles.  They didn't match my recollection of previous images.

This is not what the cats have been catching!  

Allow me to interject.  I DO indeed have some moles, some field or house mice, and many voles.  I have come across a couple of molehills.  I have trapped mice in the house and the shed (a natural wintering place where I have found nests and they have chewed into corn gluten fertilizer bags).  

I know I have voles because of the shallow surface tunnels and them eating unprotected tulip and hyacinth bulbs by digging tunnels belowground and also digging down from the surface.  They also leave small clean holes in tunnels for surface access.  Moles don't do that and mice don't tunnel.

I have no idea why shrews completely escaped my mind for many years.  Sometimes, you just miss things.   It's embarrassing to miss basic stuff, but it happens. I think the cats are catching shrews.

Sure looks like what they have been catching to me...

According to Wikipedia,shrews forage for seeds, insects, nuts, worms, and a variety of other foods in leaf litter and dense vegetation, living both over and under ground.  They say (to my surprise), shrews are not even rodents, being more related to hedgehogs.  

I know a lot of "stuff".  But what I DON'T know is so much greater...

A wise person once said that it isn't what you know that gets you in trouble, it's what you think you know that isn't true.  It wouldn't be the first time for me.  I thought I knew my yard's rodents; I didn't.  Live and learn.

If so, they have the perfect place here other than the cats. My back yard is semi-wild, mostly organic, covered with leaf litter and groundcover plants and brambles (so there are rarely disturbed by my activities).  I have many large seed-bearing plants (hollies, berries, and nandinas), rich undisturbed soil (lots of earthworms), and many small-rooted plants.

I gather that they (like voles) use existing tunnels, but usually live aboveground (or The Mews wouldn't be catching them).

I don't actually mind what rodent or shrew The Mews catch.  All are annoying in some way.  I respect a certain degree of lethality in them and glad to see that Laz has joined the club (Ayla used to be a great "mouser" but has retired in her senior years).

But I should probably retire "mousies" as meaning all small furry mammals.  Convincing them to change the term might be more difficult.  It's their blog, after all...  

But for myself, I will try to remember the differences.  Shrews are not mice or voles and they don't eat my plants (but like moles, they do eat my worms).  Mice aren't a garden problem, but voles are.  Voles don't invade the house, but mice do (but The Mews get them).  I don't have many moles or mice, but I do have a lot of voles and shrews.

And the moles aren't much of a problem themselves, but the tunnels they build are highways for the voles and shrews.

So my original plan to reduce the moles that make the tunnels the voles (and now shrews) use is still good.  Mole repellent (industrial castor oil) and stomping the tunnels flat and milky spore powder (organic) to kill off the grubs so the moles have less food is still the way to go.  

Just that The Mews are catching shrews, not voles...  I THINK.

Relatives

I was visiting another site and a post involved visiting relatives when young.  It brought back some memories.  

We lived in Virginia at the time when the trip to the Grandparents took 12 hours.   Both sets of grandparents lived north of Boston, but near each other.  Well, that's why my parents met.

I loved visiting my dad's parents,  they had a large house and a small farm.  Grampa had a lobster boat, so we were drowned in lobster in many forms when we visited.  There was a tree house in the big apple tree.  We helped pick beans and corn.  Gramma was Amish and made wonderful chicken with dumplings.

She got up early and so did I as a pre-teen and teen and we played rummy until the rest of the family got up.  I helped her make breakfast.  It's partly how I learned to cook.  My Capt Crunch cereal there.  Waffles, pancakes, eggs...

Grmma never gave me any mercy when playing rummy.  I learned to win the hard way.  But the highlight of the evening was when the family sat down to lay "Cinch" (aka Set Back).  If you don't know what that is, it is like cut-throat bridge and Hearts or Spades.

I was allowed into the family game when I was about 13 or 14.  Gramma vouched for me for good Rummy skills.

Its a no-holds-barred game and no one gave mercy.  You declare how many tricks you will take and the highest bidder announces the trump suit.  You toss away all the non-trump cards and fill your hand to 6 -8 cards  from the remaining deck.

Gramma was infamous for saying "oh, I filled"  meaning she had a hand of all trump cards.  She played lethally.  She almost always won.  But it was played in pairs.  I was usually her partner when me visited.  The players were Gramma and Grampa, my uncle, Dad (Mom could never play cards worth a damn) and sometimes an aunt or two.

Dad had his Mom's killer instinct, but his best game was poker.  Gramma and I thought alike and usually won.  It was never kindness to me as a kid.  Like I said, they all played to win; they would beat their kids at Candyland when they could.  It was altogether wonderful.

Every year, we went to a great chinese restaurant. 

And then we had to spend days at Mom's parents.  That was altogether awful.  They were Victorian.  The house was always dim with fake Tiffany lampshades everywhere.  Kids couldn't do anything fun.  You could hardly see anything after sunset.

The house was practically a mausoleum.  Chairs had doilies to protect the fabric.  The most exciting thing was a next door kid who could flip backwards and land on his back.  I mowed the lawn "for fun".  

 Grampa was kind, but very religious.  He once took me on a walk as a child just to get me into a church.  He thought that might change my whole life.  I felt cheated and lied-to.  The high point of our visit was when Grampa would walk us to a candy store.  We couldn't have any actual candy, but a candy bar was allowed.   I always chose a Skybar.  It had 4 different pockets of flavors.

Gramma Mom's cooking was horrid and I learned why Mom couldn't cook either.  Every vegetable had to be boiled to death.  If brocolli wasn't gray, it wasn't cooked enough.  Meat was boiled and if you haven't had a boiled steak, I don't recommend it.  One year, Gramma Mom even bought a watermelon "for us kids" and she cut the heart out for herself because "why would children care"?  

I did and Mom shushed me.

Aren't different grandparents weird?

Marvel VS DC Comics

I grew up reading Marvel Comics.  DC Comics were beneath me.  I once read a newspaper article explaining that Marvel was aimed at college students while DC was aimed at high schoolers.  That may have been an understatement.  I could tell the difference when I was 14.  Marvel all the way! 

DC:  Superman was invulnerable unless he was exposed to some dozen forms of Kryptonite.  He learned to fly by floating with balloons.  His opponents were silly people.  He had a supergirl, a superdog and there may have been other superpets too.  As Superman, he had muscles like a pro weightlifter, but as Clark Kent he was "less built".  He had no personal problems other than women who's initials were always L.L.  His eyeglasses deceived everyone...

Aquaman was a joke.  Green Lantern couldn't handle anything yellow.  Batman had promise in his darker aspects.  None of the characters were actually adults and most had children as sidekicks.

Marvel used to be (I think) "Timely Comics".  They had the worst junk I ever spent a dime on.  I recall a giant eraser smoothing the surface on the Earth until some genius threw paint in front of it and revealed a weerd creature damaging the Earth (the eraser could then finally erase it).  How it followed the creature just behind was never explained).  And one where a creature on a planet grew to control the whole thibg glorying in its power until a human turned on the tub faucet and washed it away to drown.  REALLY BAD STUFF!

But then Stan Lee came along with some broke artists.  The owner changed the name to Marvel.  And he had seen a new DC comic book of heroes getting together (Justice League) and told Lee he wanted a team.  In a week.  The group created the Fantastic Four.  And later The Avengers.  They later created Spiderman.

Te cause of their superpowers was kind of lame.  Cosmic Rays for the Fantastic Four, Gamma Rays for the Hulk, a radioactive spider for Spiderman.  Antman had a shrinking/expanding ray. 

But the point was that they had "problems?  And as teenagers, we understood "problems".  The FF were normal except for Ben Grimm (the Thing).  Spiderman had to hide his powers from friends and family and was a dud (early on) with girls.  The Hulk had no self control. 

Iron Man was at least self-created, but a real jerk.  Sub-Mariner and Captain America returned from some old 1940s comics.  New villains and heroes were created, and THEY had personal problems.  EVERYONE in the Marvel world had problems.  Thor was originally lame Dr Blake who struck his cane in a special cave and became Thor and had to go back and forth (the cane was somehow Thor's Hammer).

Both DC and Marvel had a letters page at the end of each comic book early on.  DC spoke to children; Marvel spoke to adults. 

But I partly wrote all that to say this...  The movies of the DC and Marvel characters are relatively equal in quality.  That's mostly because the movie-makers aren't the DC writers.  Give a telented production team, and they can do almost as much with Wonder Woman or Superman as Spiderman or The Avengers.  But "relative" is not "equal".

I liked the Superman movies.  They actually made a fairly real person out of him.  Batman seems the realist of the DC characters.  But Marvel has really done it right.  I can't rewatch the Superman movies (I can rewatch the Batman ones, sometimes), but I can rewatch the Marvel ones.  And that includes the critically-panned FF movies.  *I* liked them!  Though they really did mess up Dr Doom and Galactus a bit. 

I haven't watched the 2 last Avengers movies.  Cable wants too much.  I may check out streaming on my Amazon account...