A vocabulary of landscape — a landscape of words
1083 entries
vole
A vole is a small rodent with a blunt nose, small ears mostly hidden in fur, small eyes, and a short tail, distinguished from a mouse by all of those and by its habit of making runs through grass at ground level rather than climbing. Voles eat grass and roots, breed extremely fast, and are the staple prey of owls, kestrels, weasels, stoats, and foxes across the northern hemisphere.
Etymology
The word is a shortening of vole-mouse, which came into English from Norwegian in the eighteenth century and means, literally, field mouse. So the first half is doing all the work and the mouse has been dropped, leaving English with a word that means field and nothing else.
Notes
Vole populations cycle, rising and crashing on a roughly three- to five-year rhythm across northern Europe and Asia, and the predators that depend on them cycle with a lag. In a peak year, owls raise large broods and in a crash year many do not breed at all, so a barn owl census is really a vole census. Their surface runs are visible when the grass is parted and are used by field surveyors to estimate numbers without trapping.