Moles, Voles, and Skunks: How to Handle Lawn-Digging Wildlife in Coastal Maine

You walk out onto your Kennebunkport lawn on a July morning and something has been busy overnight. Raised ridges snake across the turf. Chunks of grass are flipped over like someone went at it with a trowel. Or narrow, worn paths wind through the lawn near your garden beds. Wildlife damage is one of the most common midsummer lawn complaints we hear from homeowners across Kennebunkport, Kennebunk, Wells, and the surrounding coastal Maine towns — and the fix depends entirely on correctly identifying which animal you're dealing with.

Here's how to tell moles, voles, and skunks apart, why coastal Maine properties are especially attractive to them in summer, and what actually works to protect your lawn.

What Animal Is Digging Up My Lawn in Maine?

The three most common lawn-digging culprits in coastal Maine are moles, voles, and skunks. Moles create raised tunnels and volcano-shaped mounds of soil. Voles carve narrow surface runways about two inches wide through the grass. Skunks (and sometimes raccoons or crows) flip and tear turf overnight while hunting for grubs.

Each animal leaves a distinct signature:

• Moles: Raised ridges of turf you can feel underfoot, plus cone-shaped dirt mounds. Moles are insect-eaters — they're after earthworms and grubs, not your plants.
• Voles: Shallow, winding runways worn into the grass, often radiating out from stone walls, ornamental beds, or tall grass at the property edge. Voles are plant-eaters and will also gnaw bark at the base of shrubs and young trees.
• Skunks and raccoons: Turf peeled back or flipped in irregular patches, usually appearing overnight in mid-to-late summer. This is almost always a sign of a grub infestation below the surface.

According to the UMass Extension turf program, prime habitat in New England can support hundreds of voles per acre — and coastal properties with stone walls, beach grass edges, and wooded borders offer exactly the cover they love.

Why Coastal Maine Properties Attract Digging Wildlife

Properties in Kennebunkport, Cape Porpoise, and Goose Rocks Beach tend to share features that make them wildlife magnets: sandy, easy-digging soil; stone walls and hedgerows that shelter voles; irrigation that keeps soil moist and earthworm-rich for moles; and — critically in July — Japanese beetle grubs developing under the turf.

Grubs are the engine behind most midsummer skunk damage. Japanese beetles are actively laying eggs in coastal Maine lawns right now, and those eggs hatch into root-feeding grubs by August. Skunks can smell them through the soil. If your turf is being torn up at night, the animals are a symptom — the grubs are the disease. Treating the grub problem removes the food source, and the digging stops. Our lawn maintenance programs include grub monitoring and treatment timed to Maine's beetle life cycle, which is the single most effective way to end skunk and raccoon damage for good.

How Do I Get Rid of Moles in My Maine Lawn?

The most reliable mole control is reducing their food supply through grub treatment, combined with trapping in active tunnels. Repellents containing castor oil can push moles to neighboring areas temporarily, but on properties with rich, irrigated soil, moles typically return unless the food source changes.

A few practical notes for coastal Maine homeowners:

1. Confirm the tunnel is active. Stamp down a section of raised ridge; if it's pushed back up within 24–48 hours, that run is in use.
2. Don't panic over every mound. Moles eat grubs and larvae, and their tunneling loosens compacted soil. One transient mole in spring is different from an established network in July.
3. Skip the home remedies. Chewing gum, mothballs, and sonic spikes have no reliable evidence behind them and waste a season while damage spreads.
4. Repair promptly. Press ridges back down and overseed damaged strips so weeds don't colonize the bare soil.

How Do I Stop Voles from Damaging My Lawn and Plantings?

Vole control in coastal Maine comes down to habitat management: keep grass mowed, pull mulch back from the base of trees and shrubs, and clean up tall vegetation along stone walls and bed edges where voles shelter. Voles rarely cross open, tightly mowed lawn — they need cover to travel.

This is where lawn care and landscape maintenance work together. Overgrown foundation plantings, unedged beds, and deep mulch "volcanoes" around trees create vole highways straight to your most valuable plants. A well-maintained landscape — trimmed shrubs, defined bed edges, mulch at a proper 2–3 inch depth — removes the cover voles depend on. It's worth addressing now, because the worst vole damage in Maine actually happens under winter snow cover, when they tunnel beneath the snowpack and gnaw turf and bark undisturbed for months. The habitat cleanup you do in summer and fall determines how bad your spring reveal looks.

Repairing Wildlife Damage: Late Summer Is Your Window

The good news: wildlife-damaged turf recovers well in coastal Maine if you repair it at the right time. Late August through mid-September is the ideal repair window, when cooler nights and reliable moisture return.

A proper repair sequence looks like this:

• Treat the underlying cause first — grub control if animals are digging for food, habitat cleanup for voles.
• Rake out damaged areas and remove dead or flipped turf.
• Core aerate compacted or tunneled sections so seed makes soil contact. Fall is the best aeration window in Maine, and it doubles as recovery therapy for damaged lawns — we provide core aeration throughout Scarborough and the greater southern Maine coast.
• Overseed with a coastal-appropriate mix of tall fescue, perennial ryegrass, and Kentucky bluegrass, then keep it consistently moist for three weeks.

One more seasonal note: if voles have been active on your property, mow the final cut of the season shorter than usual and clear leaves thoroughly. Matted leaves and long grass under snow are exactly what winter vole damage feeds on. Our winter services customers often bundle a final fall cleanup for this reason — it protects the lawn while we handle the plowing.

When to Call a Professional

If damage is spreading week over week, if you're seeing skunk digging plus browning patches that lift like carpet (a sure grub sign), or if voles have girdled bark on trees and shrubs, it's time for a professional assessment. Identifying the animal correctly on the first visit saves a full season of trial and error.

Wakem Lawn Care serves Kennebunkport, Kennebunk, Wells, Arundel, Biddeford, Scarborough, and the surrounding coastal Maine communities with grub control, lawn repair, aeration, and full-season maintenance programs. If something's tearing up your lawn and you want it identified and handled, contact us for a free assessment — we'll tell you exactly what you're dealing with and lay out a plan to fix it.