Well that looks very much like the vole damage to my perennials, but I have no idea if voles eat woody plants too.

I never had a vole problem before last year, and their population probably exploded because of the inordinate amount of snow cover we had last winter. Those d*mn voles decimated some of my favorite cultivars of native perennials like Baptisia and Echinacea. My cat killed DOZENS of them last summer, and I stomped a few myself, and they were still killing a perennial here and there this fall. This year I'm thinking about circling the roots of certain perennials with hardware cloth at planting time.

Here's a pic of vole damage to a Hosta -
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well.. on the first.. you have to award them extra credit for enthusiasm and stick-to-it-tiveness ... lol ...

the circling roots on the second would have killed it regardless.. and i wonder if it didnt fall down on its own.. and present its soft underbelly ....

anyway .. sorry for your lose.. life isnt a disney movie.. and as far as i am concerned.. death to all vermin .... better come up with a plan to severely reduce your population.. this summer ... because i doubt they are simply going to leave on their own accord ...

ken

Terrene-I can't put hardware cloth around the tree's roots....those roots have to grow, you know? Dang those voles!

Ken-I agree. Someone was really taking their time to do a good job on that first one. That was my bargain tree from Lowes. The second one? That is the tree that came from a very good nursery and I never would have known that the tree had those circular growing killing roots if those voles had not shown them to me. What I learned...you don't get what you pay for. I'll never trust that nursery again.

hey eddie ...

a lot of us .. bare root all plants.. and check the root system.. before we plant ...

and that is usually done when the plant is dormant ... not leafed out ... even if i have to 'hold the plant over' .. until the proper planting season ... just because you buy it.. really doesnt mean it is the 'proper time' to plant it ... and that is a hard lesson to learn ...

and right now.. i am ignoring the vole issue ...

you could have bought this tree in leaf.. in summer.. and stuck the pot and all in the soil ... and then after it lost its leaves in fall .. and the PROPER PLANTING TIME ... unpotted ... done root surgery ... and properly planted it ...

the root snarling is endemic in trees/shrubs.. simply for the reason.. that they are plants with large potential.. and from rooting or grafting .. the producer has to hold them for quite a few years.. to grow them large enough to attract the sale ... and the profit margin is so small.. they really cant up-pot thousands of trees every season ...

though it would be nice if the producer had the time and money to TLC every plant ... in every pot.. it usually doesnt happen ...

you can take care of the problem if you are proactive ... and willing to learn ...

as to the voles.. i dont know what to tell you ...

ken

Maybe you can sell the property and build elsewhere? Just kidding..... Sort of. It looks like vole damage to me, but after years of battle I ended up moving (not because of the voles) and never really found a way to control them. Best advice is to pull back mulch and dead leaves from around the plants (at least a couple feet) and embrace compacted soil (which is hard for them to dig through). Barriers can work but under cover of snow they are likely to invade everywhere.

I suspected them in the deaths of numerous shrubs and trees... Including mature dogwood, cherry, lilac, roses and butterfly bush. It was pretty bad.

eddiebird, after googling the link below I would say that your trees have been vole-atized. Your pix are better than most of the links, showing the gnaw marks in detail. Maybe you'll get some of the snowy owls that they say are en masse around KS this winter!
A couple of articles I have read mentioned the white geotextile tree wrap to discourage them.
hortster

Here is a link that might be useful: Vole damage

Eddie you are right, I think the hardware cloth might work with a perennial, but not a tree obviously. That is too bad you lost your dogwoods. I am frustrated with them and not sure what else to do. The cat works well, so probably does one of those little Terrier dogs, and a friend of mine said he has a trap that I can borrow this Spring. I even bought a whole lot of cayenne pepper which I plant to sprinkle in the planting holes of certain perennials. Kato, that sounds like they did a number in your former yard. Mine haven't touched any woody plants as yet.

Here's what a vole looks like, kind of like a mouse, with shorter tail and more prominent jaw and teeth (present left by the cat) -
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Here's my vole patrol. She's gotta step it up!
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Welcome to my world! We have voles everywhere around here. We have an indoor cat who in the summer tries to sneak out whenever we open the door, and he isn't out there but a few minutes before he's brought us a sacrificial vole at our front door.

The first time I ever planted trees several years ago I'd never even heard of a vole, but they attacked all my maples and Golden Raintrees, just decimated them. I was furious.

So when I bought all new trees we fenced in every one of them with hardware cloth. We didnt want to bury the fences so we poured pea gravel around each of the 4 sides of the fencing. One bag for each 5 foot side of the fence. Anyway, it worked! I had read that voles hate hard rocks etc and hate walking on them.

I was just outside yesterday measuring for some new trees to plant, and I saw the voles' race tracks everywhere in our yard, heading right into the neighbor's yard, and they didn't get to any of our trees! Though they destroyed one of the neighbor's trees. You can see their path right to the trunk of the tree too. We're about to plant 23 more trees on 2 of our property lines, and we're going to fence them in as well, but one long fence going around them, not like the individual squared fences we did for our other trees. We're never doing that again! lol Oh, but if you aren't going to spread gravel around your fencing then you must bury the fence! Because we didn't bury the fence on the trees that the voles ate; they just duck under the fence and went to town on the trunks. We thought we were fencing out dogs and rabbits, not voles!

We have had an explosion in the vole population due partly to heavy snow cover the past several years. Poor hawks and owls just can't get to them. They were gnawing many of my trees, and I have had good luck with Plant Skydd in the granular form for small varmints over the past few years. I started buying the larger bags of it and spread it with a seed/fertilizer spreader on all the beds. With the trees I actually dump a lot more around the base of each small tree. I have one area of the garden that the voles particularly enjoy (japanese maples, katsura and stewartia) and after dousing it with the stuff I haven't had any issues at all. Seems to be working so far, although it is by no means inexpensive. I always have to add vole and deer repellent into my budget each year. I truly abhor all forms of rodentia, even those "cute" striped rats, chipmunks.

We've had hardly any snow this year so I hope the hawks, owls, fishers, coyotes and others in the woods are getting nice and fat on the voles! Terrene, what a good little hunter you have!

Well Thyme, she's a pretty good mouser and when she catches a chipmunk, "mousey", "voley" or "moley" she gets praised lavishly, is told she's "a good hunter girl" and then gets a little treat. Also, this particular cat doesn't let the prey suffer, she usually kills them quickly with a sharp bite to the gut, for which she has also been praised. I don't want them to suffer unnecessarily and although they can be "cute", I dislike rodents intensely. They are a vector for disease (i.e. Lyme disease) and can be incredibly damaging to property, structures, and the landscape.