Moles! How to find the runs?

[Pilot]

To clarify my original post, all we see around here are mounds; no tunnels, no soft ground, no clues. Well, except sometimes when we pour sulfur into a hole we dug in the mound and use a weed burner on the sulfur. You see smoke coming out of other mounds and maybe one time in 25 you see smoke coming out of undisturbed ground somewhere between mounds. The smoke of burning sulfur is very toxic; don't stand downwind if you try it. Warning: It doesn't work very well.

A friend brought his gopher blaster and we went to town with that, more fun than effective. Maybe worked on 10% of the critters--maybe.

I've also used a hose in the mounds, not expecting to drown them, but if you find the mounds have been piled up again the next day, you know the critter is active in that area. Doesn't tell you where the tunnels are.

 

[ultrarunner]

As a teen when I had more time and also a dog that liked to hunt...

I would spend half a day with garden hoses and flush the gophers/moles whatever out.

The dog always seemed to know where they were going to pop up...

 

[newbury]

Get some road flares and stick one in a tunnel then light it and cover the hole.

That can Gas them

My Father had a similar approach. He would go out in the yard with a bag of small firecrackers, find a tunnel, make a hole with his boot heel, drop a lit fire cracker in, cover the hole with his boot let the firecracker explode. This was in rural Vermont.

 

[hawkeye08]

Dry summer here, so nice watered lawn has plenty of food for them, more mounds than ever this last summer. At first we let dog dig them out, but after seeing a few "trenches" in the yard where she followed a run, we don't let her dig in yard, she has a blast at the edge of the lawn that borders the fields, of course, she may be chasing them into the yard and they know that is safe from her now... frustrating to have a nice lawn and then have a bunch of mounds.. new mounds daily as they move across the yard..

 

[ultrarunner]

I've heard of prevention barriers... a concrete footing or broken glass in a trench of wire mesh... are any or these effective?

 

[MossRoad]

I've heard of prevention barriers... a concrete footing or broken glass in a trench of wire mesh... are any or these effective?

Depends how hungry the mole is... I've seen them tunnel under 3' + concrete footings, as they were in our dirt floor garage!

 

[mapper]

I was looking at a Washington home for sale the agent said the owner had a recent gopher survey/study... sometimes I wonder where this is all going... but it could just be I remember a simpler time.

That was for Mazama pocket gophers, they are a federally protected species that inhabits the rocky prairies around here. If they are found on your property you are restricted in what you can do and may have to pay huge mitigation fees if you want to build. The critters were supposed to be getting really scarce but they sure seem to be finding a lot of them now!

 

[ultrarunner]

Yep... at one time I thought Washington was very different from the SF Bay Area but time and experience has shown parts of Washington are very similar to the SF Bay Area... primarily Seattle and Olympia...

I don't have gophers that I know of... heavily forested area... but the rules have sure changed in my tenure... had at least 3 buildable future sites on my property but looks like no more and my home would no longer be allowed under the new wetland setbacks...

The Mazama gopher made the news several times in the SF Bay Area...

 

[teejk]

To clarify my original post, all we see around here are mounds; no tunnels, no soft ground, no clues.

That's been the experience around here as well...and the mounds are bigger than I've ever seen which I guess means they are running deeper and they need to clear more dirt. I need to read more about them...like do they have an entire underground highway network like gophers (in which case water or gassing is a waste of time)?

 

[MossRoad]

They've got a ridiculous set of tunnels. Our yard is a tad over 100 yards long. There's a wire mesh fence on the property line. There's one well-used mole tunnel directly under that fence that goes the full 100 yards. Out at the street end, it extends towards the road, disappears under the road, and pops back up on the other side of the road! On the back end it goes somewhere out into the "mole factory", my term for the 5 acre woods behind us that has sent more than 300 of these critters into our 1 acre.