Voles Eating/Ate my Arborvitae?
Hello, (Ne Ohio)
I had an arborist from Davey Tree come out earlier this week to look at the brown branches on my 5 year old (8 ft tall) arborvitaes. We have 16 and probably 10 of them have had some sort of browning on a small section of them this summer only. Some spots are 2-3 feet up. The arborist said that it's probably rabbits, he showed me the girdling on the branches. He said that voles do not eat trees, and there are no deer in my area. I did some research and am I finding that vole DO in fact do this to arborvitae. We had a mole and vole problem last August/September and had a wildlife company out, they put mole traps and then she also put out vole bait boxes. I think the company forgot to come back because they just left the bait boxes there all winter.
My question is, do you think this is something voles did and was it done over the winter? I first noticed brown spots in June and then new ones have appeared recently. I don't think it's rabbits because of it being 3 feet up? Unless the snow as piled up and they did it in the winter? We did see rabbits last summer, but not really since. I haven't seen any vole evidence this summer at all, no holes in the beds or anywhere else.
The arborist suggested that we have them do a liquid humate application to help the trees with repair. Do you think this is worth it? Isn't it too late and now we should just focus on pest control? The cost of the application is $482 (would include all shrubs too, they won't just do the arborvitae unfortunately).
Thank you so much, these trees were costly and is our only privacy from the neighbors.