Penn State's website had some good looking info that covers my area, and I'm pretty sure these were from meadow voles, which apparently stay close enough to the top that birds and other predators will get them, and they can be caught with regular mouse traps. Pretty sure I saw one in the house this winter, and mistook it for a gerbil. I also had a lot of garter snakes in the area, which is probably why I never had moles or voles before. Letting the chickens run free for the last 4 years really decimated my snake population... another reason why I've been waiting to replace the chickens.
Enough trees have been coming down around here that it's going to change my local ecosystem a bit, so for now I'm just going to keep a close eye on things and see if they manage to balance out. I don't mind a reasonable amount of loss to pests, as long it keeps the overall system healthy. Ground diggers like this may actually be able to save me a lot of labor when it comes to turning this clay into soil!
Neat! The voles I have dealt with always burrow deep enough that the dogs have to dig them up.
LOL! Chickens are hard on everything!
Yup!