Wyoming | Gary,
We used to use a "burrow builder" and strych on groated oats with some star anise and brown sugar mixed in. Gophers ate the stuff up. A burrow builder has a "torpedo" like hollow point on a shank with a coulter in front, to run under the ground (maybe a foot down) and then a press wheel behind it to close the slit. A couple of companies make them. There is a hopper and a metering system to dispense the poison on grain down into the burrow.
By using a burrow builder in a field infested with gophers when the moisture was just right so that the burrow would hold up for days (soil is very sandy in Nevada, and when it dries down the burrows collapse quickly), we'd get a 80%+ kill in one application. It's quick work - you can cover a quarter section with lines about 20' apart in a few hours.
The trick was to intersect as many existing gopher tunnels as possible. When a pocket gopher finds a tunnel he didn't build, he investigates it because he thinks a competing animal is in his tunnel system. They come upon the strych-on-oats and that's all she wrote.
Strych was outlawed for above-ground applications in Nevada in 2006, I think. Dunno about other states.
The traps we'd use in Nevada are called "Cinch" traps, after the manufacture's name. Here's a link to some info on them:
http://www.cinchtraps.com/medium-gopher-trap-p-18.html
Click on the picture to see a much larger pic. Now, you can use the Cinch trap in original form, but we would make them more reliable and more lethal.
First, you get a torch, soften the jaws and bend the killing tips inwards a bit. Make the opening more circular. Quench the hot steel in water to re-stiffen the spring steel. Then grind the tips to be sharp as knives.
Then take some emory cloth and polish the release end of the trip bale. This will be the part at the back end of the trap bent like a "S." If the bale drags on the edge of the trap too much, some gophers will back off the trap. You want that bale to slide as easily as possible. Some professional gopher trappers replace the bale with stainless steel welding rod, so it is slick, slides easily and will forever because it won't rust.
Lastly, if you're replacing the trip bale with stainless rod, make it a bit longer - ie, bring that loop closer to the killing jaws by, oh, about 3/4". I talked to Cinch back in 2002 about doing this, and they said they'd do it for me for a buck a trap, but they didn't sound happy about it. Oh, and back when we bought our traps in 2000, they were $7/ea. I see the price has gone up considerably. And the Fed tells us there's no inflation...
OH! Another thing and this is very important when using Cinch traps: Coyotes will want to dig out the gophers and eat them. To prevent your trap from literally walking off into the sagebrush, you should drill a 1/4" to 3/8" hole in the main plate of the trap so you can stake it down with a big piece of welding rod or steel stake. We'd use big gas welding rod, which was pointed to make it easier to push into the ground and then we'd curl a loop on the top and tie flagging tape through the loop so we could spot the trap set from across the field.
The first year on the farm in Nevada, we trapped over 7,000 gophers out of a quarter section. No, I do not exaggerate. How do I know this number is accurate? Because the county had a pocket gopher bounty. You'd bring in your gopher tails in a plastic bag (frozen), 50 to the bag. The nice lady at the ag co-op extension would count the tails and give you $25/bag.
The county's gopher bounty budget was about $4000 that year. And we got $3500 of that. The next year, the county dispensed with the bounty. They'd never had any single farmer claim that much of the bounty before and some of the old timers were a little piqued that a nooob came in and depleted the bounty fund in two months.
Weasels: Weasels are the best natural predators. The best way to protect the weasels is to use traps, not poison. We had some weasels on the farm in Nevada. I could watch a weasel hunt a squirrel-infested field for hours. They're beautiful to watch. Weasels don't walk on the ground, they swim in the air above the ground. And when they heard a ground squirrel down in their hole, the weasel would disappear down the hole like watching smoke coming out of a pipe in reverse. A couple minutes later, the weasel would re-appear, with the rear haunches of a squirrel in his/her mouth.
Wonderful creatures. Wish I could breed them in quantity. Unlike badgers, they don't dig new holes, just kill what is at the bottom of existing ones. I'd keep every weasel I could on a field. |
Have gophers in the yard... poison?
