Gopher

Man has been locked in an epic struggle with the gophers forever.

The gopher's penchant for eating crops is the bane of farmers. Networks of burrows are the nemesis of baseball players across the prairies.

To successfully combat the enemy you first must understand it, and the experience many a gopher-hunter has had has told them that gophers are a formidable foe. They are not easy to get rid of, and quite often you may be tempted to use some age-old methods that in reality are quite ineffective. Let me just mention those right off the bat so we can move on:

Flooding the burrow with water - generally very ineffective. You may succeed in driving a gopher out of the burrow, but now you are faced with clubbing it to death. Flooding is not going to drown them in the burrow, and a flood of water running through the hollow burrows also risks causing the chambers to collapse, creating a pretty unsightly problem for your lawn.

Gas cartridges - these give off an irritating or toxic smoke, but usually the gopher detects the problem long before it has any serious effect on its health, and simply pushes a wall of dirt up to close off the chamber and keep the smoke out.

Sound-emitting devices - you can't avoid the marketing of these magic boxes, that promise to "safely repel unwanted pests" of all kinds, by driving them off with ultrasonic sounds. From the conclusions of many university studies these are best labeled as modern-day snake oil. They have no effect on the presence of any kind of pest.

Repelling with certain plants - there are no plants that will actually drive off gophers, although if you have a heavy cover of plants they don't like to eat they may go somewhere else. But, just planting a few garlic bulbs or castor bean plants around your garden will not affect them.

The methods that do work for established populations of gophers include trapping, poisoning, and fumigating. Use a professional to solve your gopher problems.

The Life and Times of the Pocket Gopher

The name "pocket" gopher is given to these animals because they have fur-lined pouches in their cheeks that they use for carrying food. The pouch is NOT used to carry dirt, but the dirt is simply pushed along by the gopher with its front legs. They use their legs and teeth to dig the dirt out to create their tunnels, and then push the excess dirt out through little side tunnels and onto the outside surface of the soil or lawn.

Gophers are rodents, and there are over 100 varieties of them in the United States. They have long, hard front teeth called incisor teeth, they have tiny ears and small eyes, and tiny little tails that act as "feelers" when the gopher runs backward through its burrow system. Gophers are solitary animals, and you never have more than a single adult gopher living and working in a tunnel system. During breeding

season males will be allowed into a burrow by a female, and of course the baby gophers are cared for by the mother until they are old enough to be off on their own. Otherwise, even though you may have many gophers living in your yard, and their tunnels may wander and curve around each other, they do not mix.

Gophers are vegetarians, and live almost entirely underground, feeding on roots of shrubs, trees, or landscape plants as well as plant material they gather during short sojourns above the surface and drag back into the burrow to eat or place in storage chambers. They may even chew on the lower trunks of small trees, girdling the bark and killing the tree. They may feed on lawns above ground, within a few feet of their burrow opening for a fast retreat if danger approaches.

Gophers do not go into hibernation, but instead are active year round. Even when the ground is covered with snow the gophers will tunnel at the surface of the soil, and these surface mounds can be seen easily when the snow melts away in the spring. In warmer weather the main tunnels stay around 4 to 8 inches below the surface, and may include over 800 feet of tunnels for a single gopher. Small side chambers are created for their nest area, for food caches, and for depositing their feces, since they cannot carry this material up to the surface.

I've got a hole or a pile of dirt - what made it?

Some other animals also burrow in the soil, and to avoid confusion here are some characteristics:

Norway Rats- an open hole with well defined paths leading away from it

Ground squirrels - very large opening with dirt spilled out below it.

Moles - evidence usually is surface tubes or tunnels created by the foraging mole.

Gophers- dirt mound is "horseshoe" shaped, and on the inside of this horseshoe arc there will be a small "plug" of dirt about 2 to 3 inches across and usually of damper dirt.

The mound is created when the gopher pushes the dirt out of the chambers it is digging, and it digs a lateral tunnel to the surface and then pushes the dirt away from the opening, creating the arc or semi-circle around the opening. A fresh plug of dirt then is placed in the opening to close it off. The gopher may remove this plug at night and feed carefully at the soil surface, and then replace the plug when it crawls back underground.

Fumigation

This is the final method of control, and probably the most effective. It also is the one method that only Licensed Professionals are allowed to do, for the use of fumigation chemicals is restricted to trained and licensed people. The one product used for burrow fumigation is called "aluminum phosphide", and one major trade name of the product is called Fumitoxin. It comes as solid pellets that are placed into the burrow, the opening is closed, and the humidity in the burrow causes the pellet to disintegrate and release the toxic gas. The gas penetrates throughout the entire burrow system and does not alarm the gopher, so the rodent is killed before it is able to wall off the area the gas is coming from.

This method offers several advantages:

No toxic bait is used or remains behind The pellet disintegrates completely in just a few days, and all toxic material dissipates and is gone The gophers die within the burrow and do not tend to come out above ground Any fleas or other parasites on the rodent are also killed Acceptance of bait or movement into traps is not a concern

Again, though, this must be done by a licensed applicator, but it works so effectively that you might consider it.

To eliminate or to tolerate - a good question. If the gophers are off in the woods or a meadow somewhere then they probably should be left alone to do their thing. But, if they are ruining a lawn or destroying a garden, or if their burrows present a safety hazard to ankles and feet on a playground or athletic field, then there may be a justifiable reason to control them.

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