Gopher – A Little Animal that Causes Big Problems
Posted on Jan 26, 2010 under Pests | 1 CommentGopher – A Little Animal that Causes Big Problems and an Unsightly Mess
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The past many years we’ve had gophers in our yard and garden. In fact, ever since we moved here back in the late 80s. Our property used to be part of a gently sloping hill, probably part of the foothills below the Cleveland National Forest. The builder leveled most of the land into a smoother downhill slope and put 55 houses on it which is the tract I live in.
Since that time we have been experiencing the ever present little piles of dirt the gophers leave in the wake of their labyrinth of underground tunnels in our yard. It seems like we are the only one around us with such a big gopher problem.
From what I’ve been told and what I can tell we likely have far more problems that our neighbors because we don’t have a dog or maybe even horses. On both sides of us they have dogs; in fact most of the houses around us have dogs or horses.
Whether it’s true, or not, several people have told us that the vibrations of dogs running around the property is unpleasant to gophers and keeps them away. Whether true or not, that seems to be the case with us. We are the only one around us that does not have a dog(s) or a horse. I an assuming that if a dog’s vibration bothers the gophers, then a horse’s footsteps should too.
Our yard was pock marked with dozens of holes and mounds of dirt that kept getting more numerous as the years went by. About a year ago I was talking to a neighbor and mentioned our gopher problem. I told him I had tried several methods of killing them, but none had succeeded.
He said he no longer had any serious gopher problems and it was the result of a gopher trap he was using. I couldn’t believe it since I had also tried using traps with no luck. He gave me one and suggested I try it because it worked very well for him. I took it but didn’t get a chance to use it for several months because I was already trying a different type of gopher device designed to eliminate gophers by sending a pulsating tone into the ground.
A friend had given us that expensive device to try because she said it worked wonders for her and got rig of all her gophers and they had not come back. I never thought the device would work for me because I didn’t think it was powerful enough to actually send the sound vibrations more than a foot or so in our sandy soil. We had a big yard as opposed to her small yard so I felt the chances were not good even if the device did work regardless of the 9000 square feet claim on the device.
After a trial period of six months or longer I was right. The device did not work. It was sending audio pulses and I could feel the vibrations when I held it in my hand, but it was probably too weak to penetrate the ground very far. After only a couple of weeks I saw a new gopher hole less than two feet away from the device. Right then and there I gave up hope, but decided to give it a fair trial for another half year just in case there was some validity in their claims for the product.
No such luck. The sonic gopher repellent did not work. I was glad I hadn’t ordered a dozen or more that my wife wanted me to get. By now our front yard looked like a little putting course with dozens of holds and little mounds of dirt besides most of the holes. You couldn’t walk more than a few feet in the lawn without avoiding a hole or dirt mound.
I had tried gopher traps before, poison gas, poison food pellets, flooding them out with water, vibrations with the above mentioned device and several little windmill like rotating devices, but nothing was working. So I finally decided to give the trap my neighbor had given me. We have a very big yard so I knew if it should by chance work for me that I would have to buy a lot more traps.
I bought three similar traps that essentially were the same type, but much less costly. Since we needed two traps for each gopher hole, to block off either direction the three traps could hopefully catch a single gopher and with any luck a second gopher.
Nothing happened for a couple of weeks. It looked like the traps weren’t going to work after all because we kept seeing new gopher holes and mounds of dirt every other day or so. Then about 3 weeks after placing the traps we caught one. It was a large gopher and one that my wife was so happy to catch.
A week or so later we caught another gopher and a couple of days later another one. This was getting good. After about a month we had caught about four or five gophers. It looked like the traps were working. There were starting to be almost no new holes and things were progressing well.
We started setting traps in the back yard and there too we caught several more gophers. After catching a dozen or more gophers we stopped counting. The front yard and even the rear that had been filled with gopher holes looked far better once the holes were filled in and no new holes or dirt mounds popped up.
It’s now been several months and virtually no new gopher holes have shown up. When the rare occasion of a single hole does appear the culprit is caught and that new problem disappears. It’s nice to have a regular lawn nowadays and not the previous mess the gophers kept our yard in the past years.
