SANTA CRUZ (June 2009) - There’s probably not a gardener in California who hasn’t tenderly planted a rose, or heirloom tomato, only to watch it be dragged underground by a hungry gopher.
All too often, irate gardeners have retaliated with poisoned baits and gases, tainting their soil with strychnine, arsenic, zinc phosphide, and other nasty poisons. In addition to finding their intended targets, poison baits for gophers and moles have been known to kill songbirds, owls, fish, amphibians,and even family pets. Obviously, a large enough dose of these toxins could also be fatal to a human.
But there are alternatives to turning your backyard into a Superfund site. A combination of trapping and gopher-proof garden design can keep your yard mostly gopher-free without resorting to chemical warfare. Also, if done correctly, trapping can be a quick and humane alternative to an agonizing death by poison.
Surface Traps Are Easier
Trapping can be uncomplicated, too, despite the elaborate diagrams you’ve probably seen for digging into the gopher’s main tunnel, placing two traps facing in opposite directions, securing said traps with wires to a stake on the surface, and plugging the enormous resulting hole in your lawn with a wad of balled-up carrot tops “or other tender greens”, as described in one garden book.
Santa Cruz gopher expert Thomas Wittman, an organic farmer with decades of rodent control on his resume, teaches a technique of surface trapping that’s easy on the landscaping, and simple enough for beginning gardeners to master.
“My mission is diverting people from poisons,” said Wittman, a former owner of Molino Creek Farm, famous for its dry-farmed tomatoes, and current proprietor of Gophers Limited, a humane and non-toxic pest control company. “Surface trapping takes so little time when you compare it to setting traps down in the (gopher’s) burrow.”
Know Your Enemy
The first step in successful trapping is identifying your pest, as I learned when Wittman visited my supposedly gopher-infested backyard. After surveying the dozens of mounds of pulverized dirt surrounding my raised beds and erupting through my brick patio, Wittman came back with a surprising verdict.
“You don’t have gophers here, you’ve got moles,” Wittman said. “Actually, you’ve got a mole. Moles are solitary creatures, and all the tunnels in this area are almost certainly the work of one animal.”
The handful of gopher holes Wittman found in the lawn were long abandoned, a sign that my cats successfully hunt something other than flies. But if Rocket and Rico are catching the gophers, why was this lone mole still running rampant?
For one thing, moles rarely emerge from the ground, making them harder to catch. Also, mole fur is incredibly dense, and “a lot of cats don’t like to chew through it,” Wittman said.
Mole fur grows straight out like a velvety brush, and developed that way because the creatures scoot back and forth in their tunnels without turning around. Gophers, on the other hand, can flip over to reverse course in the narrowest of tunnels, and their glossy fur lies flat against their bodies.
Mole fur used to be made into bunion-cushioning pads, but was replaced by synthetic “moleskin,” a technological breakthrough that probably threw dozens of mole-skinners and tanners out of work.
In any case, moles’ and gophers’ different habits pose different problems for gardeners, and require different solutions. In fact, since moles don’t eat plants and reproduce sparingly, many gardeners opt to simply leave them alone. The mole in my yard was hunting earthworms, and had no designs on my vegetables.
Moles Are Carnivorous
“Moles are carnivores, and gophers are vegetarians,” Wittman noted. Moles eat up to half their weight in worms every day, and prefer irrigated areas where worms thrive. Their tunnels can be seen winding along just below the surface, and are punctuated by occasional piles of soil.
Live-and-let-live types often simply collapse a mole’s tunnels by stepping on them, thereby re-setting any plant roots that have been disrupted. The dirt piles can be raked flat, to avoid smothering the healthy grass beneath. But moles can also undermine patios and walkways, and cause flagstones to crack.
Trapping a problem mole requires finding a fresh section of tunnel and setting a trap that will grab the creature as it wriggles past. Because my mole was undermining a patio and walkway, I decided to trap it. Wittman set two different types of trap. A cinch trap, a device with jaws set at the end of long wires, was inserted into one tunnel by way of a molehill.
A second, plunger-style trap with wicked downward-pointing spikes, was set to straddle another active tunnel. Wittman stepped on the tunnel, then set the trap atop the collapsed runway. The mole would discover the blockage, work to clear the tunnel, brush the trigger with his back and be speared by a quick thrust of the spring-driven spikes. Yikes.
An average mole patrols hundreds of feet of underground passageways, so it usually takes moles a day or two to wander into a trap, Wittman said.
Unlike moles, gophers eat plants, breed fast, and can quickly turn a landscape into a pockmarked moonscape. Both types of animals can be excluded by installing gopher wire beneath garden beds and lawns. But wire-lined sod is a costly undertaking, and gophers can also topple established shrubs and fruit trees. While many gardeners are agnostic about mole control, few are neutral about gophers.
Lacking any gopher action in my yard, Wittman showed me the grounds of a commercial client, acres of landscaped lawn surrounding an office park. Like moles, gophers are solitary animals, and the clusters of eight to ten holes that could be seen punctuating the expanse of lawn were each home to just one gopher.
The exception to this solitary life is when a female has a litter, which can happen two to five times per year, producing as many as ten babies at a go. Nobody knows for sure how gophers hook up for sex, but Wittman is pretty sure they find one another during nighttime romps above ground. Gophers regularly emerge from their burrows and ramble above ground after dark, which is how they become food for owls.
Gopher Eruptions
If she survives her moonlight rendezvous, the female gopher burrows as far as three feet underground and constructs a three-chambered den with separate rooms for food storage, nesting and the latrine. She stocks up on plants and roots, and seals herself in to birth her litter. The litter spends its first weeks nursing in utter darkness before emerging all at once in what Wittman describes as a “gopher eruption.”
The youngsters quickly disperse and establish individual tunnel systems, where the cycle begins again.
Wittman found a cinch trap set a few days earlier, and pulled a dead gopher from its burrow. The trap jaws had snapped the creature’s neck in an instant, and the long wires allowed Wittman to shake the body from the trap without touching it. He gently tucked the gopher back into its hole with a knifelike Japanese garden tool called a hori-hori, and buried it with loose dirt from the mound.
Not All Traps Kill Quickly
Some other types of snap-traps can catch a gopher in the gut, leaving it to suffer a drawn-out death, Wittman said. The cinch traps he prefers almost always deliver a more humane end. Even after years in the trapping business, Wittman is bothered by needless suffering, and takes care to dispatch troublesome rodents as painlessly as possible.
When setting a gopher trap, Wittman finds the telltale plug of dirt in the center of a freshly-dug mound, and neatly removes it with a twist of the hori-hori. A gopher’s mound usually has a fan-shaped mound of dirt, and the underground tunnel runs in the opposite direction from the fan.
Wittman finds the tunnel with a gentle probe of the hori-hori, and inserts the jaws of the cinch trap. While a mole trap must be covered with dirt, a gopher trap is left uncovered so air and sunlight will penetrate into the gopher’s tunnel. Gophers hate that, and if they are still in the vicinity will rush to plug their hole back up.
Persistence Required
Sometimes they're so prompt, the newly set trap will snap before Wittman has a chance to return to his truck. It makes trapping look easy, but gopher control is a lot like housework. It needs to be done regularly, and there’s no end to it. Gophers have been here longer than we have, and they’re not going away.
“It’s all about managing the population,” Wittman said. “One way to look at it is that we’ve helped expand their population by providing food, irrigating lawns and planting gardens. Trapping is managing the population. We will never get rid of them completely.”
Back at my house, two days later, I found that the plunger trap had tripped, spearing an enormous mole. I felt bad as I buried him, but also relieved that I can now repair my caved-in patio without worry about further damage. I hope the next mole limits himself to the lawn and garden, where I’ll be happy to live and let live.
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