When I was a kid, I lived across from an Arabian and a Quarter Horse farm outside of Rochester, Minn. that were next to each other. We made our money by trapping pocket gophers, striped gophers and moles in the prized horse pastures. We stored the front feet in jars of salt and turned them in every month and we're paid 10 cents for striped, 50 cents for pocket and 75 cents for mole by the owners. Pockets were taken with victors, striped by victors or by bb gun, moles were taken by an amazing dog that would sniff them out and dig them out and toss them out on the ground.
Its been 40 years since being on the campus of WSU. We had Bible conventions on the campus during my teenage years. It was apparent that WSU was serious about agriculture and animal science with the amount of pictures of both of these sciences exhibited around the campus.
Thank you very much!!! I have a gopher directly in front of our house up against the wall and windows. The area is landscaped with gravel and the piles look awful. We're near Taos, NM and I tried flooding the tunnels with water from the hose but not sure if anything happened. The bugger chewed through 2 to 4" of rigid foam insulation over the sewer pipe leading to the septic tank. This tunnel took an amazing amount of water at a high rate and just never quite filled up all the way.
SF Bay Area, shale and clay garden. Gophers are eating veg garden, fruit trees, and MY ROSES, even with chicken wire baskets around their roots. Help. Poison dispenser on hand with depending tube. ( Yard Butler). How often should I make the rounds? I am old and angry. Some drown themselves in my pool, but not enough of them to matter. Neighbors aren't troubled? Odd. Tried burgers, traps, fusses, gum, fox urine, cat feces, propane, ( boom, too much) I have even thought about a shot gun, but not inside the city limits. Help. Trapping just isn't working for me poison maybe but I worry about local hawk population. Do poisoned gophers come up or stay in the ground?
@@annesutherland7345 Since my dogs will dig out the dead gopher, I found and underground trap to be the correct solution. Once the trap is sprung, it can't hurt the dogs.
Ive seen a neighbor use propane......fun to watch......but it never worked !!!!! In a few weeks......they were back !! On the other hand......I trapped mine........the never returned ! Dead !
I've got one of those things. I also have an old Briggs & Stratton powered edger with a flexible steel pipe on it instead of a muffler, as well as several Gopher Hawk traps. No one method works 100%. All of them have about the same kill rate, but are used for different situations. The gopher Hawk trap is by far the best trap I've used; super-easy to set, super-easy to check, and you never need to touch the business end of the thing. Also; I've YET to find one tripped with no gopher snared in it!. My soil is hard though, so I can only use them when I can dig into a tunnel deep enough to reach the main line. Otherwise the gopher just buries the trap. The Rodenator is expensive. I got mine well-used for $500.00. This thing is NOT for urban/suburban use! I've blasted tunnels and have had the gopher return and seal up the damage within the day! I honestly can't see how they survive an underground blast that makes the earth heave and then drop fro fifty feet, but some do! I've also had the Rodenator kill the gopher and unzip about fifty feet of tunnel on my property! If the tunnel's short, it'll make one hell of a noise as the gas tries to find an exit, causing the chickens to stop laying for a week, the goats next door to hole up on the roof of the barn, and the sheriff to show up and ask "What the HELL was that??? I use the edger, which I call "the gopher machine," for holes near the chicken coop and the neighbor's goats. I also use it when I find a new burrow early in the day. I'll gas the tunnel right away, and then blast it later on in the day to destroy the tunnel. If I let the new burrow sit until late in the day, the gopher backfills the thing about three feet deep! The flexible steel pipe I use for the gopher machine is a flexible gas line; the kind used to connect a gas clothes drier. I remove the muffler, screw in a 1/2" galvanized nipple, and screw the gas line onto that. I don't like to use the gopher machine near the veggie garden or the fruit trees. I don't like the idea of pumping hydrocarbons into the ground where my edibles are growing. This is where the Rodenator and Gopher Hawks have the advantage. I don't like poisons either, as the dying gophers sometimes exit their tunnels and are eaten by cats, dogs, and birds of prey, who also ingest the poison. Gopher-gasser smoke bombs are perfectly designed to separate you from your money and nothing else. The same goes for those "sonic" gopher repeller things. Road flares work... sometimes... They're about $3.00 each though. This is a never-ending battle for truth, justice, and the American way! Good luck to all!
I flooded with water once before with great success but it was a new invader and had not established extensive tunnels yet. I just made sure his face was covered with water once outside the burrow and nudged him into a 5 gallon bucket and took him for a ride down the road! Perhaps trapping might be better? What brands do you recommend?
Tried water but in shale and clay, nothing. What do you recommend? Back hill unwalkable by me, so they live down there but come up to destroy my yard. Grass area looks like a practice range for hand granades.