Since the 1970s, changes in agricultural practices in French mountain areas have produced large homogeneous grassland ecosystems. This has led to population outbreaks of a grassland rodent, the fossorial water vole (Arvicola terrestris) which causes severe damages on harvests and economic losses. Predators are believed to be an important regulating factor of the water vole population dynamics. During 8 years, A. terrestris populations and their diurnal predators were monitored on 5 study sites in Auvergne. Here we focus on the common buzzard (Buteo buteo), the most abundant predator locally, and we examine if this species responds to vole population and landscape feature variations. Analyses were performed using generalized linear mixed effect models. Results showed positive relationships between A. terrestris and B. buteo densities in autumn without time-lag and in spring with a time-lag of one year. Furthermore, large abundances of common buzzard were associated with an important number of patches of forest and small size plots of grassland. In the literature and compared to open grassland, those areas have lower population densities and smaller fluctuations of A. terrestris in average. However, although our results were suggestive, here we failed to detect such a difference statistically, probably due to the relatively small sample size used in our study. This study confirms that the common buzzard favours fine grain landscape mosaic of wood and grasslands and that current or past abundance of water voles modulate the common buzzard foraging strategy. This has important consequences in term of pest control and biological conservation.