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.
