Another name for garden gopher is pocket gopher. These animals belong to the small rodent’s family and are very delightful in annual bulbs and some other plants that could be used to beautify garden. Garden gophers are very tiny animals that are looking attractive in their appearance and could make you get on your nerves when you discover the extent of the damages they can cause on your garden. You can get rid of them absolutely if you have full knowledge of their do’s and don’ts.

HOW TO DISCOVER GARDEN GOPHERS

Although garden gophers are pretty and attractive unfortunately they can cause a serious havoc to your gardens and its environment. They can hardly be found on the ground at will apart from their destructive work on your plant and yard. The operative technique of gophers used to is different from that of the voles and moles. Garden gophers usually link up the entrance and exit of their tunnels to dirt. Besides dirt could be found all around the entrance of all their openings also.

CHARACTERISTICS OF GARDEN GOPHERS

In case you come across a pocket gopher by chance since it is 100% sure that you can never just see it at will, it looks like a rodent with ranges between 5 and 12 inches in length. Pocket gopher’s cheeks are wide and fur-lined and their cheek is used as pouches. This is where they derived their names (pocket) from. Gophers have small quantity of hairs on their short tails and they have ability to dig ground up to 800 feet in your environment.

IMPORTANCE OF GARDEN GOPHERS

Despite the fact that garden gophers are attractive and beautiful in their appearance, they cause a great havoc to your gardens that are experiencing sound growth. These animals choose flowers and vegetable bulbs as their favorites. Whenever flowers and vegetable bulbs could not be found, they feed on the roots of trees and the bushes and thereby destroy the plants totally. For instance, gophers are so destructive to the extent that just a single one can potentially damage gardens and landscaping within few days.

HOW TO GET RID OF GARDEN GOPHERS

Garden gophers are very difficult to come about but you have to know that it is not necessary for you to see them before or where they cause the havoc. If you did not dislike any trapping or poisonous substance method, then that is the best and suitable method to catch garden gophers and control them in your environment. In case you choose to attack them with natural method, then it is advisable to be vigilant on the length and breadth of your garden or environment and uproot all the shrubs and unwanted plants. As a result, hawks and other types of predators can prey on the garden gophers and thereby reduces the number of gophers. Another method by which you can eliminate garden gophers is to use garden wire mesh which permits dogs and hunts to dig and husk. It is well known fat that the garden gophers are always active by the day in damaging the plants, attractive shrubs as well as herbs. Some of the pets do not intend to eat garden gophers but they make life unbearable for gophers and frustrate them from sustaining their havoc activities.

MYTHS

When your lawns and garden are littered with the tunnels of gopher, you may believe that you have been invaded. Meanwhile, you are having mere gophers in your compound performing those acts. However, garden gophers are known to be lonely pests that cannot be found residing in groups or twos unless during their reproduction period or during the time the younger ones are growing with their mother.

BACKGROUND

Due to the havoc caused by the garden gophers, the farmers always flood their entire farmland with excess water before planting their crops. By so doing, the available gopher will get drown or be chased away from the surroundings. But this flooding technique was abandoned due to the fact that the soil nutrients are washed away and thereby not effective in eliminating gophers.

The most common type of gophers that are found in the garden, lawns or your environment is known as pocket gophers. They usually range from 6 to 10 inches in length and are created with forequarters that are very strong and powerful which they used to excavate. If you want to search and get rid of gophers in your environment, garden or lawn, the first thing that is very essential for you to do is to search for the exact burrow where you can set your traps or put poisonous baits in the active tunnels that is very closer to them. Could you believe that just an ordinary gopher can dig several burrowing mounds per day? Therefore, to get the main burrow could be deceptive but you can still detect the tunnels and burrows of gopher through careful examination of your yard as well as your garden environment.

However, there are some requirements that will guide you in locating gopher’s tunnels:

• Examine your yard or environment to see if there are mounds of soil which usually shows the presence of gopher tunnels and the main burrow. The shapes of mounds created by gophers often appear to be like horseshoe or a crescent moon when you view it from the upper part of the burrow.
• Secondly, you need to confirm if the hole that leads to the mound side is narrowly linked to the earth as this is used to detect gopher mounds. Along the line, you can discover an open hole in the early mornings which could be linked to the earth later in the day.
• Another factor that can help you to discover gopher tunnels is to search for moist and when you discover that the mounds are too much, check if the soil is fresh because it could be tricky to detect the tunnels that are active. Remember the burrow where gopher used to feed itself is usually six inches to a foot far from above the ground surface.
• Buy a gopher probe or better still, you can buy a fashionable type made from metal rod or a long pipe. If you are creating your own gopher probe, it is advisable to add hard or very strong material for instance a small piece of metal found on the shaft end which is use to enlarge the extreme tip in order to make probing the tunnels more convenient in the surrounding locations.
• Apply the gopher probe to excavate the earth up to the ranges between 6 and 12 inches underground and this could also be approximate between 8 and 12 inches at the other side of the hole or the linked opening of the mounds. By so doing, you will be able to discover the tunnels that are active from the main burrow. During this period, a sudden drop by the gopher probe application shows that there is tunnel and this tunnel used to be around 2 inches.
• Continue to use the gopher probe to poke your yard until you come across the main burrow. This could take some of your time but just be patient in doing it and immediately you detect it, you can search for the appropriate tunnels where you can set your traps or poisonous bait.

SOME IMPORTANT NOTE

It is very possible that fresh soil might not be found in the closest burrow because gophers are not the type of pest that can ever be found in a deep sleep especially during the winter periods. But if it were to be mole mounds, it could be mistaken for gopher holes for those that are not aware that moles mounds are very circular in shape and looks like volcano in appearance when viewed from one side. Another thing that makes moles mound different is that it is usually found under the surface but gopher burrow are found underground.

Gopher causes a lot of havoc to the farmland or yard and bale to destroy a big quality of vegetation in a garden within a short period of time. For instance, 15 to 22 gophers can destroy the vegetation of an acre of land and able to put in storage four pounds of vegetation per day. Therefore, try as much as you can to get rid of them from your yard or farmland.

Every diligent and careful gardener will always find gophers very worrisome to cope with. These animals in question excavate uncountable number of holes as well as unclean mounds around your yard. Eradicating them could be tasking giving the fact that they denote almost all their time inside soil. Obviously, there is no specific method of wiping out gophers from your yard or keeping them permanently from resurfacing after a brief success. All the same, you can definitely destroy a lot of them and even scare the survived ones from coming back. Simply go to any home improvement or hardware store to buy the required items. The set up is fairly simple having got gloves, wooden dowel, and gopher poison.

• Identify the gopher mounds in your compound. To be more precise, consider the crescent shaped mounds. Those are the mounds that reveal the gopher’s feeding tunnels.
• Find out many more gophers holes yet to be closed up. Be informed that gophers leave their holes unclosed at night and cover them up during the day. Meanwhile, you can still see these holes unclosed provided you rise up earlier. At this time, the gopher could be easily reachable.
• Create holes inside the mound using either a broom stick or wooden dowel. Let the holes be adequately spacious so that you can easily add gopher poison. Wear rubber or work gloves to shield your hand from contacting poison as this can be harmful to you and your pets.
• Let the gopher poison be flown straight inside each holes. Better still; you are advised follow the recommendation of the poison producer to measure the quantity.
• Go over the procedure daily until you have succeeded in killing the gophers.

NOTE

• Start the application of gopher poison in the early spring when gophers usually mate and this coincides with same period they potentially distribute themselves within your lawn.
• Ensure that you do not swallow or drink the poison by accident. If ingested by mistakes, make haste to get in touch with the poison control center in case you mistakenly ingest or enter your eyes.
• After the application of the gophers poison, fence off pets and many other animals from your garden for many hours. In another alternative, apply dog or cat, safe gopher poisons in case you are worried about the safety of your pets.

Gophers are local rodents which forcefully invade your yard and devour virtually all your varieties of plant. The best way to catch these gophers is known as trapping. If the process is strictly adhered to, it is not all that hard. To achieve your desired result, you will need the following materials such as chicken price, 2 gopher traps, shovel, vegetables, metal poles, boards

• Buy 2 gopher traps at your local gardening supply store nearest to you.
• Keep the recommendations of the manufacturer in the effective setting of the traps.
• With the application of a metal pole, discover the gopher’s real tunnel. Note that dormant or inoperative runs usually comprise debris and very hard to gain entrance into.
• Dig out the dirt using a shovel till you are able to discover the real tunnel and expose it.
• Set 2 traps inside the actual tunnel while you put the traps inside the opened tunnel to alternate each other. With this method, the gopher will invariably get trapped regardless of its direction in the tunnel.
• Use vegetable or dry cat food as bait on the traps based on your choice.
• Let the trap be sturdily wedged into the tunnel. Seal up the dug soil or dirt using a board and block the tails with the use of soil.
• Examine and re-adjust the traps accordingly. Shift them to a different location if you fail to catch the gopher after some days.
• Loose out the dead gopher from the trap and get rid of it. Ensure that you carefully wrap it with paper and plastic prior to discarding it in refuse.

IMPORTANT NOTE

• Wear gloves before setting the trap in order to prevent human scent on the trap.
• Be reminded that the application of fumigants or flooding the tunnels by water is not all that effective.
• Supposing you choose to kill the gophers, attempt different fearful methods coupled with wire baskets close to the roots. Similarly, dogs and cats are threat to gophers.

It is strongly suggested that you desist from using poison pellets as well as other toxins because if gophers succeed in dragging them to the outer, any pets or birds that eats it will surely die. On the other hand, if pet eat any poisoned gopher, it may ultimately results in the death of such pets.

First of all, how can you tell the difference between gophers, moles and voles? Gopher look a little bit like squirrels, measure about two feet from head to tail, and appear in over 100 varieties in the United States. Their tunneling habits wreak havoc on the gardens and pastures on the surface above.

Moles have bodies shaped like long tubes covered with fur. Their ears are invisible, and their eyes are tiny and usually concealed. Other than distinguishing between day and night, they are basically blind. Most varieties burrow, like gophers. Instead of eating roots, like gophers, they eat the tiny invertebrate creatures they find in their tunnels.

Voles are members of the rodent family that look like mice but have a thicker build, rounder head, and shorter tail. There are more than 150 different species of vole. They’re often called field mice in the United States and Canada. Voles also burrow, but they will also use tunnels that other rodents have dug and left behind.

Since all three types of animals are burrowing rodents, methods for control are fairly similar. Traps can be useful in capturing and killing gophers, moles and voles. Traps are available for burrowing animals; for moles, experts recommend the choker loop, harpoon and scissor-jaw shapes. Gopher traps fall into the wire and box varieties, while the most successful vole traps involve a paddle wheel that rolls the voles into the trap. If you use pellet-sized pieces of a Granny Smith apple, voles will tiptoe into the trap, not realizing it until it’s too late.

It’s not always easy to tell which burrows in a network are currently in use by the rodents below. For gopher networks, look at the plugs of dirt next to the mounds. The fresher the dirt, the more recently a gopher has used that entrance. For mole networks, you have to walk along the tunnel, flattening the opening and marking the spot. A day or two later, if there is a new opening in the tunnel, moles are using it. With voles, it can be tougher to tell, because while they will burrow new systems under the plants they want to eat, they will also use old networks that other rodents have abandoned. Frequently, you won’t know the voles have been there until they have eaten a good bit of your garden.

Once you’ve found out which rodent is burrowing and nesting in your yard, you can reach out to gopher pest control specialists or species-specific websites that will help you get rid of your infestation.

When it comes to gopher infestations, everyone can agree on one thing: the sooner they’re gone, the better. Gophers may be cute, but they are not the friendly sort of neighborhood creature you would want to pick up and pet, or to feed on the sly. They will dig tunnels all through your property, ruining root systems and leaving anything you’ve planted above them to die.

Many homeowners and pest control companies use chemical methods to get rid of gophers – typically baits and poisons and gopher repellents. While these can be powerful solutions to a serious problem, they can also have a highly detrimental effect on the environment. There are many different solutions that are more friendly to the environment and that use naturally found substances to eradicate gopher problems.

One of these products is called the “Rodenator.” You slide a tube into one of the entry holes, and then activate the device. Propane and oxygen spray out into the burrow, and then you detonate the mixture, leading to a shock wave under the ground. The force should kill any animals nearby and might collapse the tunnel system, particularly after you’ve set it off in several of the holes. According to the company’s website, the mixture will not harm the environment and leaves no damaging chemical residue.

Other natural methods for killing gophers include a wide variety of live- and dead-trap mechanisms. There are basically three types of traps that will catch and kill your gopher for you: the wire trap, which grabs and squeezes the gopher to the point of asphyxiation; the box trap, which traps the gopher against the roof of the box until it suffocates; and the cylindrical trap, which works similarly to the box trap but fits more flush with the existing tunnel. Environmentally friendly baits include oatmeal and peanut butter. Some experts recommend using a high-sugar peanut butter, such as Skippy Super Chunk. Slim Jim beef sticks are another recommended bait that does not harm the environment.

One type of trap that is not as environmentally friendly involves the use of adhesives to capture rodents. While the glue might catch a few gophers, other creatures who wander into the network might also get trapped, or if you put the trap outside, where gophers might sneak to eat from your garden, birds and other animals can end up stuck to the trap as well. Tunnel-based traps target the gophers and do not leave environmental damage behind.

No matter which of these methods you choose, if living “green” is important to you, all of these offer the chance to kill or remove the gophers without leaving any trace that will damage the surrounding plant and animal life.

Philosophies vary when it comes to methods of gopher control, gopher trapping and removal. There are some who hold to home remedies like filling up all of the holes of a gopher network with water, waiting with shovels to knock the gophers’ heads off when they surface. There are others who go the electronic route, putting sound devices into the tunnels that simulate gopher distress signals, hoping that the sounds will send the gophers into someone else’s property.

There is also the chemical solution to the problem – primarily handled with baits and poisons. There are several ways you can put the bait down into the gopher tunnel network. You can use a handheld probe to stick the bait down into the tunnel, you can insert a tube into the tunnel and then send the bait down through it, and you can even build your own extensions onto the end of a gopher tunnel to slide the bait in without making the rodents suspicious. Some companies offer more sophisticated tubes with a hand-crank device that lets you slowly drop the bait down the tube. The gophers are supposed to find it, eat it, and take it to the nest. These products tend to promise results within one or two weeks.

There are some risks to putting down baits. If your pets get into them, it can be hazardous to your health. Most bait company websites, though, indicate what antidote your pet’s veterinarian should administer in case or poisoning. If your pet eats a gopher that was killed with a Jaguar or d-CON bait, you will want to get it to the vet immediately for treatment.

There are also some poison pellets that you can use to get rid of your gopher infestation. Generally, the instructions for these products will tell you to spread the pellets around the network mounds or down into the tunnels themselves, and some of them come with a tool that you can use to slide the poison into the tunnel without caving it in, or leaving evidence of human interference. Most of these products, though, contain specific warnings against use if you have pets or children who will be around the area, because of the dangers of pets or children encountering the pellets, or pets eating the dead gophers.

Here’s the bottom line, though – you’re trying to get rid of a network of harmful pests. Any solution is likely to leave some effect behind, and so if you can keep your pets and children away from the affected areas, then poisons and baits can be one of the most powerful gopher removal methods out there.

It can be intimidating to watch a gopher digging a hole in your yard and keeping gophers out of your lawn is difficult; it can be frightening to walk outside on a Saturday morning and find eight or ten mounds in your yard, all entry points to the new gopher network that the pests have been burrowing under your yard while you were at work all week.

This fear is one of the reasons that many homeowners bring in a gopher control company to get rid of the pests once they have taken hold. After all, gophers can carry rabies, even if they do not show signs of infection. They will chew through your underground wires for cable television and telephone service, and they’ll gnaw on your water lines. They’ll dig up your sprinkler heads, they’ll chew on the roots of your trees – even to the point where the whole thing will fall to the ground. And if that’s not bad enough, they generally carry a bunch of passengers – fleas, mites, ticks and lice all like to take a ride on gophers, and at any time they can hop off their ride and wander into your house.

Gopher control companies specialize in getting rid of the pests – for good. While a few use poisons, studies have shown that the chemicals only work about one time out of four. The companies that use live-trapping techniques claim a 100% success rate; they will catch the gophers on your land, take them offsite, and then release them into the wild, or they will euthanize them. If you have gophers that have already died, these companies will send personnel to pick up the bodies, clear the smell from the property, and help the owners protect against future leakage.

As with most thing, gopher control prices vary with the seriousness of the infestation. The gopher control staff should show you some preventive measures you can take to keep gophers from coming back again. Some steps to keep them away would include burying hardware cloth vertically around the property line, under a foot-deep trench.

Warranties are hard to come by with gopher control companies, as there are many variables out of the company’s control when it comes to future infestations. However, many companies will offer incremental warranties that offer a percentage off future service that goes down as time passes after the initial service. Be sure to check out the Better Business Bureau ratings of any pest control company that you hire.

It’s certainly true that gophers represent a serious threat to your lawn or pasture and some people opt to hire a professional pest control company for gophers. Their underground networks tunnel through your root systems, leaving the ground above them bare – except for the holes, which are piled high with mounds of dirt. And once the gopher town is finished, it’s very difficult to get the rodents to move on.

Many people turn to chemical solutions to get rid of gophers. After all, if you put out enough poison, and the gophers eat it, you will definitely have dead gophers on your hands. But you’re also adding a lot of toxins to the earth. If your poisons contain strychnine, for example, and your dog eats one of the dead gophers, your dog will die too. If your toddler comes across a poisoned gopher body, and decides to put his hands in his mouth afterward, the results could be tragic. The toxins also can leach into the water table, meaning that you could be killing a lot of other organisms in addition to the gophers.

Electronic devices offer a way to get rid of your gopher problem without doing any environmental damage – or endangering anyone’s health. There are several products out there that simulate the calls for distress and alarm that gophers use to warn the rest of the town of impending danger. Hearing the sound over and over makes the gophers underground take off, and it keeps new gophers from moving in.

The “Gopher-It” by Exhart is one product that works this way. It offers coverage up to 3,600 square feet and promises results within ten days. Their deluxe option offers a LED indicator feature so you can tell that it’s working at night. The sound reverberates down in the tunnels below, so the light could be your only easy warning that the batteries have run out.

YardGard offers electronic pest repellent in the form of an ultrasonic device that makes high-pitched sounds designed to annoy the gophers enough that they will go away.

Another electronic device that can help get rid of gophers is a modern version of the scarecrow. TreeHelp.com offers an electronic owl that will hoot and light up its eyes when its motion detector goes off, and so gophers who wander across the electric eye will get a big scare and flee the predator.

If you decide to go the electronic route in getting rid of your gopher problem, or keeping gophers from coming in your yard at all, these solutions would all be excellent starting points.

There’s nothing worse than spending your spring nurturing your lawn to drive out the last weeds and create a green carpet that covers your property, only to walk outside one morning and see several mounds of dirt spread out from your front porch to the sidewalk. What this means, of course, is that you have a gopher village under construction beneath your lawn, and if you want to protect your new green rug, you will have to move quickly. If you’ve taken some steps to prevent gophers from coming in, you’ve saved yourself a major headache and some people opt to use gopher control methods with electronics.

Do you have a wooded area near your home? If so, put some owl boxes in the trees. Owls like eating gophers, and if you have owls patrolling the area, gophers will find other lawns for their construction projects. If there aren’t any groves near you, you can invest in a large bird bath, or another shallow vessel with water. Several varieties of hawks will take residence, and they enjoy gophers as well. If you think badgers or raccoons might try to enjoy the water, make sure to raise it way above the ground.

Gophers can use low-level greenery to hide from their predators. The more shrubs, weeds and bushes you have in your yard, the more hiding places the rodents will have. If you go along your fence lines and get rid of the weeds and small bushes, the hawks and owls you’ve invited to the neighborhood will have an easier time seeing the gophers before they can start digging.

Gophers don’t really like mulch. If you have a garden within your lawn, or specially landscaped areas, you can spread mulch around them to keep gophers from getting interested. You can also line any elevated beds with hardware cloth to block the tunnels. Bury the cloth two feet below the surface for maximum effectiveness. You can also put the hardware cloth vertically in the ground at the property lines to keep tunnels from entering your lawn from beneath. Keep the trench two feet deep, and slide the hardware cloth in, down along your property lines.

Put your pets to work for you. Gophers are their busiest at dawn and dusk, so put your pets outside at those times of day. Cats and dogs don’t like gophers, and so they will drive them away so they can’t dig holes in the ground.

Taken together, these steps will help you keep gophers out of your lawn. Just because the gophers want to build a town doesn’t mean they have to put it up in your front yard!

Good luck with Keeping gophers out of the lawn!

There are three primary types of gopher traps, and all of them have proven results including gopher control with bait and poisons. However, each has advantages and disadvantages that you will want to consider before choosing one of them to rid your pasture or back yard of these furry pests.

Box traps are the classic tool in gopher control. The Red Box Trap was the very first – all wood. There are some box traps that are supposed to catch the animal for later release – not this one. This trap is intended to kill what it captures.

As far as design, the box is open on one end (so the gopher can enter from the tunnel) and on the bottom. The other end has an air hole. There is a firm wire along the bottom that attaches to a spring device on top. If the gopher walks far enough inside the box trap, it will run into the trip plate, which will free the spring and wire, pulling it up beneath the gopher. The gopher will quickly suffocate, because the wire is holding it tightly against the top of the box.

For the box trap to work, you’ll need to place it even with the dirt in the tunnel. You’ll need a fairly large access hole – about a foot and a half across – for these traps. You’ll be placing two box traps in the same hole, with the open ends facing away from each other. If you are putting this trap in a lawn, you’ll want to remove the sod above your access hole and then replace it – gophers are quite good at noticing changes in their surroundings, particularly in their tunnel. The box trap sits level with the dirt, with only the wire running across the floor, and so the gopher is not as likely to be suspicious with one.

The wire trap sort of looks like those bar puzzles made by blacksmiths, with a bunch of interlocking metal. The Macabee wire trap dates back to 1900 and still gets rave reviews for effectiveness. The design of this trap takes advantage of the small diameter of a gopher tunnel. Because gophers are often pushing loads of dirt in front of themselves, they often overlook the wire trap. Once the gopher pushes past the prongs, the dirt in front of him sets off the trip lever, and the trap grabs the gopher by the chest or neck, suffocating to death.

The third type is called the “black hole.” It uses the same engineering as the Box Trap, but it is cylindrical and uses a mechanical noose poised on a spring. The round shape makes it easier to slide into gopher tunnels without the huge access holes that the Box Trap needs.

The Box Trap has the best overall reviews of the three types, but each method has its benefits and drawbacks. Home improvement stores have consultants to help you consider your specific situation.

We hope your search for gopher traps goes well.

If you have gophers in your yard, and you have most of a day to do it, you can add water to each of the tunnels, filling up the gopher town until the rodents float to the top. Then, you take a shovel and whack their heads off. This is a great form of gopher control, mole control, and vole control.

This isn’t the most permanent, or even the most effective, method out there. There is a wide variety of gopher repellents out there that will help you drive the pests out of your yard, or your garden, for good.

There are basically two types of repellents: natural and electronic. One of the most successful natural gopher repellents is the shakeable powder. It smells like fox, one of the natural predators that enjoy feasting on gophers. If you sprinkle the powder around the mounds, you will see proven results very soon. The main advantage of using natural repellent is the fact that you are not harming the environment one bit. There are poisons that can harm other animals that eat gophers who have gotten into your trap, so you’ll want to be careful.

Another type of natural gopher repellent is a powdered combination of castor oil and corncobs. This repellent works because of the gopher’s natural dislike for the scent, taste and texture of castor oil. It is completely biodegradable, and other animals, birds and plants will not be in any danger.

The best time to put out these granules is when you see the first mounds or tunnels. If you collapse the tunnels and come back in a day or two, you can see if the tunnels have been rebuilt. Then, put down the granules and collapse the tunnels again. At first, you may see more tunnels as a result, but be patient – it will work.

Put the granules out by hand, or use a drop spreader, using a ratio of one pound for every one thousand square feet of land. You can treat the entire yard, or you can treat sections so you “move” the gophers in a direction you want them to go in. If you have gopher tunnels next to your beloved oak tree and want to move them off the property, you start by putting the granules out around the mound, and leave one direction open. Then, a day or two later, re-apply, putting the open direction a few feet away. Keep moving the area in the direction of the property line. If you water after putting down the granules, your yard will absorb them more quickly.

Electronic gopher repellent takes on a couple of different forms. Basically, though, you’re talking about a device you put out in your back yard. The machine will vibrate and make sounds that scare gophers – and so they will go away, and stay away. Advantages of this type of repellent include ease of use – all you have to do is open the back every six months and put in a new battery. Also, the gophers don’t actually die – which is what happens with the use of traps and with poisonous treatments.

Whichever method you use, getting the gophers off your property as soon as possible is a must, if you want to keep your land from becoming the roof for a gopher village.

Gopher Repellents can be dangerous. Please be careful.

As cute as gophers may look, they will destroy your lawn. They’ll eat the root systems underneath it as they build their tunnel and chamber networks, they’ll stack up piles of dirt at every entrance, and then they’ll come out and eat your grass and flowers. Are you getting rid of gophers naturally or are you using other methods?

There are some devices that work better than others. Sonic repellents, which claim to drive the gophers away with sound waves, have an inconsistent reputation. Box traps are easy to use and have a reliable track record of eliminating the pests from the grasslands they have infiltrated. Find one of the primary tunnels in the gopher town and put the box trap inside it. You’ll find these tunnels as deep as a foot below the ground if you poke around a gopher mound, on the side with the fresh soil.

From this spot, dig straight down and put two traps inside, with the openings facing away from each other. You don’t necessarily need to put any bait in the traps, but you do want to keep your odor off of the traps, so you’ll want to use gloves.

Not into traps? You can use chemical treatments as well. A quick warning – if you use strychnine-based poisons, and your dog eats the poisoned gopher, your dog will die as well. Choose a poison that uses “anticoagulants” – they cause internal bleeding that won’t stop, and the death is supposedly painless for the gopher. And your pets will be safe too.

There are some other home remedies that have some use as well. Some homeowners have had success by pouring castor oil into the gopher towns; the gophers will abandon their colonies because of the smell. Don’t spray pure oil – dilute it a bit with water. Other homeowners have used mulch to create a barrier zone around their garden areas, as gophers are said not to like it. A good offense is often the best defense – putting an owl box or two in a wooded area nearby might bring the gophers some more action than they can handle.

No matter what, though, you must work to get rid of the infestation. Gophers will ruin a garden, pasture or meadow if you don’t take quick action after you see the first signs that a gopher town is under construction. Whether your solution is an mechanical, like the box, or chemical, like poisons or remedies, you’ll be glad when the last gopher has left your land.

We wish you the best of luck with getting rid of the gophers in your yard.

The word “gopher” actually refers to a few different North American rodent species, all of which burrow in the ground. These include some species of prairie dog, the ground squirrel, and the pocket gopher, which is also known as the “true gopher.” Including species and varieties, there are over 100 different animals that are called “gophers.”

Gophers have several characteristics in common: they all weigh around four ounces and range from 18 inches to two feet in length, including head, body and tail. They generally live between two and three years, if their enemies don’t catch them first. They dig extensive networks of chambers and tunnels underground, which means they can be a major headache for people planning gardens for their backyards, extensive landscaping projects, and commercial farming. As a result, gophers have come to be considered pests, and many different gopher treatment methods have sprung up over the years. If you’ve ever seen the movie Caddyshack, the assistant landscaper Carl (played by Bill Murray) takes on a gopher who has dug a network of tunnels through the entire golf course. Of course, the explosives that Carl uses to fight the gopher end up doing a lot more damage.

Gophers tend to stack up rocks and dirt in front of the holes that lead to their underground networks, which are also known as “gopher towns.” Some of the gopher adults are assigned to guard each tunnel entrance, and they will actually whistle if a predator starts to get close, and the rest of the gophers will scurry into the tunnels to take cover. Gopher towns can spread underneath huge sections of pasture or meadow, and may house thousands of the animals. The result on the land above it is drastic – it can’t maintain life, so the soil will remain bare on top of the gopher town.

Many predators will feed on the gopher if given the opportunity. Snakes from the Pituophis genus (gopher snakes, pine snakes and bull snakes) will hunt gophers. Also, dogs, cats, skunks, owls, coyotes, hawks, foxes, weasels, and raccoons are among the most common gopher predators.

Gophers eat mostly vegetation. They enjoy eating the roots that they hit while building their tunnels, and they will drag plants down into their networks as well. They will also sneak out of their gopher towns and eat grass, bulbs, flowers and other garden materials near the entrance. Bamboo, dandelions, rose bushes and alfalfa are also popular with gophers. They tend to focus on areas with lush vegetation.

We hope our site about gopher control is helpful.