Trap awaaaaay..
What are you using for bait?

Oatmeal and peanut butter

Voles will go for Granny Smith apple in a big way.

Do you see tunnels - mounding up soil as they travel around just under the surface; or is it just holes going straight down about an inch or more across. The tunnels are made by moles and used by everyone to get around. The holes tend to be voles.

I used to make bucket traps when the vole population got out of hand. Sink a five gallon plastic bucket down into the ground with the top rim level with the soil. Put an inch or so of garden soil in the bottom along with any sort of bait (I used fig newtons and apple wedges with peanut butter). Put a stick or small board across the top and place something large and heavy on top - you want a small airspace so that surface wandering animals can still drop into the trap but larger animals ignore it. I used old rotting plywood with a rock to weight it down.

Rodents of all types fall into the bucket and cannot get out. When a shrew falls in they eat all the other creatures even if they are larger (shrews have amazing appetites and metabolisms, they'll starve in like an hour if they run out of food). In the summer snakes will drop in and eat the voles or mice and usually could figure a way back out.

John, you are deliciously evil-minded and I'm going to the garage right now to get my buckets (and the shovel of course) because I gots serious vole problem in front and serious mole problem in back.
So, you say snakes could get in there..guess this is not a trap you want to check frequently except to add more bait,
right?

John, as I prepare new beds at the new house do you suppose I could install these traps and maybe cover them with a potted plant or somesuch decorative statue for a permanent trap then just shove bait down into the bucket from time to time?
For the voles that is..

Dottie - at one time I was going to design special cement slabs that fit over the top of the buckets but hid its true function. A potted plant would work wonderfully on top of that. I ended up using scraps of lumber just because I had so much of it laying around. Large flat rocks are the easiest to blend into the landscape.

I checked my traps once a week and usually had one vole per bucket. If I had a shrew it was usually dead. If you have a lot of snakes in your yard you can add some more dirt to the bottom of the bucket so that it is easier for them slither out. I don't know why the voles never figured out a way to chew through the plastic, maybe its too smooth.

Bucket traps take up a bit of space and can be a pain to hide and manage but they are way easier than snap traps or poison bait.

The best way to control voles is to encourage snakes into your yard. What we need is someone to breed a winter active serpent.

Happy Birthday, you ole vole murderer!

You'll have to speak up, these old man ears cain't hear ye!

I didn't murder da widdle volies. I got the shrews to do my dirty work.

As interesting as this sounds, I still had a vole problem. The bucket traps didn't solve the problem, they just made me feel like I was doing something.

Aw shucks (and Happy Birthday TJ !), you can't be any older than the rest of us especially me.

and here I thought you had the solution and I was collecting up my cat litter buckets hoping squares would work as well as round buckets.

At any rate, I'm on the hunt for more stucco mortar meshcloth (hard aluminum mesh) to line a trench I'm going to dig (yeah..I'm really going to dig this time) along the front walk in vole-nation.

Brenda..sorry to hijack your thread..best of luck in your trapping efforts.