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In northern latitudes fluctuations in vole populations constitute a significant component of terrestrial ecosystems. The pattern of fluctuation in any particular locality is not only of interest to researchers working on these small mammals, but also to foresters, botanists, zoologists studying predators, or parasitologists studying zoonoses. For researchers having only a secondary interest in voles, conventional methods of studying vole population cycles by trapping are laborious and expensive. A simpler alterna-tive is to use indices of vole abundance. The value of various indices has been studied by Hansson.(J. Appl. Ecol. 16: 339-347, 1979), but a need remains for simple methods that do not involve sev-eral years of fieldwork. Here we describe a method that in-volves a single visit to a locality, yet yields an approximation of fluctuations in