Why Poisons Are Not In My Bag For Gophers and Moles

Dear Readers,
Here is a recent letter a concerned parent sent me:
"Hi Mr. Wittman...I called you today in regards to my daughter's gopher problem in her suburban backyard in Danville, CA. A local pest company tried by putting strychnine granules in the tunnels only to have the gophers push it back out. Not a good answer to the problem since she has two toddlers who love their back yard. The kids were playing in the soft dirt and the green granules were in the soft dirt apparently not placed in the correct tunnels. Being a concerned grandmother, I'm all in favor of trapping the rodents while the kids are not home. The backyard has actually been off limits since this all became a very scary POISONED play yard. She has three of four new mounds a day."
This is not the first time I have heard of this and I know it won't be the last. I have heard many stories of birds eating poisoned grain and dying right on the lawn and many stories of pets and wildlife (especially owls) that have been poisoned by mistake. This is mostly due to a lack of understanding about the nature of the target animals and the poisons themselves.
Today, professionals usually use for gophers a tablet that turns into a gas called Phostoxin. When applied to a fresh gopher mound it is usually very effective. You need a license to apply it and the secondary or accidental kill rate is very low. The applicator is usually the one in danger but I have heard of accidental poisonings with this material also including the death of a child. But in terms of residual poison left in the ground, there is none.
Poisons that are available to non professionals, like strychnine and anticoagulants are much more dangerous to kids, pets and wildlife. First the strychnine baits are usually coated over seeds, usually milo, a common round bird seed and colored bright green or green blue. This seed flows easily from dispensers like funnels and poison metering probes. When put into a gopher tunnel it is usually fatal but sometimes the gopher pushes it back up out of the tunnel. When used for moles it is completely ineffective as moles or carnivores and do not eat seeds so they usually push it back to the surface. Birds are the ones who usually end up eating it but so do other seed eating mammals like mice, etcetera. But as in the letter above young children see it as candy and may eat it. So my advice is to stay away from poisons and especially strychnine.
Antocoagulants are the next most popular catagory and they are fatal only after the target animal eats the grain or raison coated bait for several days, allowing the poison to build up in the animals body until internal bleading causes death. Though not as dangerous to a non target animal ingesting one dose, this can be a problem when predators like hawks and owls eat the poisoned animal. There is a lot of documented evidence of secondary poisoning of wildlife.
So, I say trapping is the best strategy and I have developed methods that can be as effective or more effective than poisons. I offer this information to you on my website and can supply you with the tools to achieve gopher, mole and other small animal control easily and without endangering other animals, people or even our water sheds and marine environments.
Thanks for listening,
Thomas

Live snaring Gophers

People often ask me at lectures about live trapping gophers to relocate them. You can catch a gopher in their main burrows using a special trap called a Sherman tram. This aluminum folding trap is used by many researchers to catch all kinds of small rodents and can be effective but requires constant monitoring as gophers can only live so long in them, usually just a few hours. As gophers do come out of their burrows at night, traps like a small Havahart can also be used baiting them with onions or carrots. Again, if you were to leave this trap out all night chances are that the gopher would probably die of exposure before you got to them in the morning. This not only defeats the purpose of live trapping but also is not humane in the least.
I pondered this a lot in my business as I like to study gophers and then one day my daughter, 12 years old at the time, told me of a fellow student who, during morning break and lunchtime, was catching gophers every day, putting them into his lunchbox and then releasing them after school in a nearby meadow and saving them from the trapping program that was in progress by the maintenance staff.
So my daughter told me he just used a piece of string and a couple of pencils. I asked her to investigate and learned the very useful "two pencil" method of snaring gophers. I found it to be a great and effective method and kind of fun as well and much akin to fishing.
The setup is simple. You take a piece of cotton string about ten feet long and tie a small loop in one end, then pass the string back through the loop to make a loose snare. Place this loop around one of those open gopher holes that you see usually in the morning or during the day. Often you can tell by dark moist soil marking the spot. Place the two pencils next to each other so that they are by the gopher burrow hopefully opposite the direction the gopher is coming out of. You can tell this by the fan of soil that is pushed out by the gopher. You want to be opposite the fan of dirt. Then take the loop of string and lay it around the burrow with the knot of the small loop against the pencils so that when you pull the string, the pencils will hold the knot in place and allow the larger loop to snare the gopher around the chest. Then play out the string and relax on the ground in a prone position and act like you are part of the scenery.

Soon the gopher will come popping up to check out what is going on. Wait till he is going in and out digging and pushing soil and then just give the string a light tug and you may have got him.
Keep tight tension on the string and lift him into a convenient container like a bucket or lunchbox. Relocate as soon as possible and put some soil and grass in the bucket so the gopher can stay cool. Relocate to a spot where the gopher may not encounter an angry gardener or lawnkeeper - so zen and karma free -aahh. Keep doing this until you are gopher free and then you may want to start visiting neighbors.

Installing Gopher or Mole Wire and Baskets Under Lawns and Plants

I get a lot of questions about the proper way to install a wire barrier to prevent gophers and moles from damaging lawns. This can be one of the most costly mistakes one can make when installing a new lawn. The cost of the installation is high as it is and then the extra cost of the installation of the wire is daunting. However, in areas of mole and gopher populations this step is worthwhile if done right.

I have seen many installations where the wire used was aviary wire, like chicken wire but with half inch diagonal mesh instead of one inch. This kind of wire was not meant to be buried and will fail in a short period of time. My choice of wire is to use either galvanized hardware cloth with one half by one inch openings or "gopher wire" wire made specifically for burying underground. One brand to consider is "Diggers" gopher wire which is a three quarter inch galvanized mesh and soon there will be available a stainless steel mesh.

If the sod is installed directly on top of the wire gophers will go under it and pull the grass down through the wire and moles will push piles of soil up through it defeating the purpose of the extra expense. Proper placement is to install the wire and then cover it with one to two inches of soil and then lay the sod on that. If you exceed one to two inches then gophers and moles will just tunnel in between the sod and wire.

Contractors sometimes try to talk you out of this extra step but be firm, this is the step that makes the extra expense work. Below is the first stage of laying the wire. I like to see the wire laid so that the leading edge of the wire or the part the is shingled under the next is toward the invading gopher or mole. This usually means that if the lawn is next to the house, the second row of wire goes under the first and so on. Just think of the animal tunneling under the wire. You want the seams to be layered so that if there is a small opening it is away from the direction of the tunnel.





Next you see the overlapping and soil is added as the sod is laid. The wire is held in place with sod pins or landscape staples







The staple placed about 2 to three feet apart. Again be very careful to have tight overlaps of 4-6 inches without buckling or openings.

Sometimes a vertical barrier is more appropriate for a garden area or to fence a wild area and home area. I recommend a trench 2-3 foot deep and install the wire with a ninety degree bend to the outside. Because gophers also invade from the surface, an above ground portion of at least six inches is needed also. Sometimes this can be tied into a fence or border



Gopher Baskets are very easy to use and install and I recommend them for perennial plantings, especially young fruit trees or roses. You can make them out of gopher wire or hardware cloth again stay away from making them with chicken or aviary wire.








Below is the kind of damage you can avoid with proper wire placement.




If you have questions and comments please email me or comment here. My web site is gopherslimited.com

Welcome to the Gophers Limited Blog!
My intention here is to help you solve your animal pest problems without using poisons. Poisons can have harmful effects on children other non target animals and pollute our precious water supplies.
My business has been working with all kinds of people from backyard gardeners, to farmers, landscapers and thousand acre vineyards and public areas, solving animal and human interactions that are troublesome.
My focus, when Gophers Limited started was just gophers and moles and now am working with any animal. I love the diversity of this job, the many beautiful environments I work in, the incredible animals, and the great people I have met along the way.
I will start this commentary with a little information about controlling gophers. I give many lectures on this topic to a wide audience. I have to be pragmatic about gopher and most rodent populations though. If there is excess food in the environment then populations will increase. This is easy to see with rats, for example, if you raise chickens, the some of the food ends up on the ground and it attracts rats. Soon there are many rats and you need to do something to bring the population back in check. Gophers are the same and the excess food is your garden, lawn or favorite roses. By creating a garden or landscape you have given the gophers the signal to multiply. You have a few options, you can fence them out, figure a way to make it unpleasant enough for them to leave or you will have to trap them. remember that gopher populations are a balance in nature, so you may not be able to just keep them at bay, you may have to manage the herd.
What ever you do I would love to hear about it and discuss the strategy on this blog.
More later and welcome,
Thomas
PS Visit my web site for more about me and Gophers Limited