Cabrera's Vole is one of Europe's rarest and most localised rodents, found only in a very specific corner of the continent's southwest. It requires such specific habitat – damp meadows with rushes and tall grasses – that its presence can be predicted with considerable reliability simply by locating that vegetation.
It was formally described as a species in the early 20th century. For decades, it was thought to be a mere regional variety of a more common vole, until later genetic studies confirmed it to be a distinct evolutionary lineage, with no close living relatives outside the Iberian Peninsula.
Cabrera's Vole is a medium-sized rodent for a vole, larger than the Common Vole. Its fur is greyish-brown with a somewhat straw-coloured tinge, and it has a short tail and small ears. It differs from other Iberian voles by its larger size and by upper incisors with a visible longitudinal groove. This feature it shares only with one other European vole species, which is geographically very distant.
Small track, 1.3-1.8 cm, with 4 fore toes and 5 hind toes. Elongated droppings, 5-7 mm long, are found in large quantities scattered along very visible surface runways. Cabrera's Vole actively cuts these runways through dense vegetation of rushes and tall grasses. This is a distinctive feature of the species, as other Voles do not create such marked runways.
The most reliable sign of its presence is precisely these runways cut flush with the vegetation, along with small piles of stems cut into regular pieces near the burrow entrances.
Damp meadows, rush beds, and grasslands with tall, dense herbaceous vegetation, linked to soil moisture, from lowlands to mid-mountain areas. Endemic to the Iberian Peninsula, with a fragmented distribution across Spain and Portugal, absent from the rest of Europe.
Herbivorous, it feeds on stems and leaves of rushes, grasses and other tall herbaceous plants, which it actively cuts to open surface runways through dense vegetation.
Cabrera's Vole lives in colonies with some social structure, associated with specific patches of damp habitat with tall vegetation, outside of which it rarely moves. It is very sedentary and depends on these habitat patches remaining unaltered for years, with little capacity to colonise new areas if its original habitat disappears.
Its populations are considered fragmented, with a small and potentially declining area of occupancy. This is closely linked to the conservation of wetlands and wet meadows. In many areas of its distribution, these have been drained and converted to agriculture in recent decades.
Drainage and desiccation of wet meadows and rush beds for agricultural use, alteration of the water regime by water extraction, and fragmentation of suitable habitat patches, hindering exchange between populations.
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