What damage do voles and gophers cause outdoors?

Of the two animals in this question, only one lives here and does real damage: the vole. New Hampshire has two species that matter for outdoor plant damage — the meadow vole, which is the more common lawn-and-orchard concern, and the pine (or woodland) vole, which tunnels and feeds underground. Both are true herbivores, and both are capable of genuinely killing a young tree or shrub, which sets them apart from every other animal covered elsewhere in this hub's yard-and-garden cluster.

UNH Extension's own orchard guidance is direct about the mechanism: meadow voles do much of their bark-gnawing and girdling under the cover of snow, where it's invisible until the snow melts and reveals the damage in spring. A tree girdled all the way around its trunk — the bark and the living cambium layer beneath it chewed away in a complete ring — cannot move water and nutrients past that point and typically dies, even though the rest of the tree may have looked perfectly healthy all winter. Young fruit trees, blueberries, and ornamentals like juniper, dogwood, and rose are named as especially vulnerable in university extension guidance, precisely because their bark is thinner and more accessible than a mature tree's.

The pine, or woodland, vole causes a related but harder-to-catch version of the same harm: instead of girdling visibly at the trunk, it tunnels below ground and gnaws roots and the root collar. Because none of that is visible from above, the first sign is often simply a tree that looks less vigorous than it should, or one that sits more loosely in the soil than a healthy tree would. It's a real threat to orchard and ornamental trees, and it's exactly the kind of damage that gets misattributed to a 'gopher' because underground root injury sounds like what people assume gophers do.

Pocket gophers are a real, and in their own range genuinely damaging, animal — but their established range in the United States covers the Great Plains, the West, and parts of the Southeast, and stops well short of New England. There is no established pocket gopher population in New Hampshire. When a New Hampshire homeowner reports 'gopher damage,' the animal actually responsible for eaten roots and bark is a vole, and the animal responsible for tunnels and mounds with no plant-eating involved is a mole — a third, unrelated insectivore covered on its own page in this hub. Getting the animal right matters because the fix is completely different for each: trunk guards and vole-specific trapping for voles, simple lawn repair for mole tunnels, and nothing at all for a gopher that was never actually here.