Moles and molehills

[Fastball]

Just wondering if anyone has experience with moles and the damage they leave behind.
Our area has been hit with a plague of moles in the past year...and our properties are covered with their hills and holes. Frankly, it looks terrible. We致e done a host of things to try to curtail it, and I知 reduced to dumping rat poison pellets in their tunnel holes beside fresh piles of earth. Now it痴 springtime, and the pasture is full of dirt and holes. What does everyone else do? Back blade the earth to flatten them down? Box blade the ground even?
Cultivate?

 

[cphilip]

My wife can make a mountain out of em...

 

[bigdeano]

I have a 10' spike tooth harrow that I fold the spikes down and drag it around. Does a good job of knocking the hills down if I do it before the grass has grown up thru them. It's all I can do to keep the moles out of the lawn, the rest of the 5 acres of pasture has gotten pretty rough over the years.

 

[flingwing1969]

Totally not efficient but what I used to do was make a nice cup of coffee about sunup, pour it into an insulated go cup, grab my 12ga with #6, and wonder around watching the ground and enjoying the morning. When I'd see the ground heave - I'd put the muzzle 2" from the ground at that point and pull the trigger. Very satisfying but I don't think I made a huge dent in the population.

 

[Wagtail]

Have a look through the "Similar Threads" at the bottom of this page. As K7LN says, it's an annual subject for you in the Nthn Hemisphere.

No moles in Tassie, although we do have a Mole Creek... named because the stream pops up, then goes underground, then pops up again.

 

[marchanna]

Moles are antisocial, and apparently can produce up to a hundred feet of tunnel a day, so depending on the size of property, you might only have a couple to contend with. There’s a special poison you buy for them that actually dissolves into a gas and fils their tunnels with poison gas.

Most of my experience was with groundhogs. Their holes are huge; a serious hazard when you’re mowing long grass at a good clip.

 

[Tx Jim]

When I think of moles I remember the movie Caddy Shack. Try Googling Rodenator

 

[coralhead]

I run the cultipacker around to try and close up the surface tunnels. It does not get rid of them but the ground is rolled back down and it gives me some seat time.

 

[MossRoad]

Search TBN for "moles"...

Here's a link to The Mole Man's website.... TONS of great information!
Mole control, biology and trapping help, 1986, professional, author, tom schmidt | The Mole Man

The only practical way to control them is to trap them out. We live on 1.1 acre. I've killed well over 300 moles in about 6 years. So despite the claims that they are anti-social... I've killed 3 in the same tunnel in the same day. My guess is it was some sort of mole over-population we went through. After year 7, they decreased to only half a dozen per year for the past 8 years, or so.

Anyhow, my preferred trap is the Victor Out O Sight mole trap. You can pick them up for about $10 each. I have 6. They work well in any soil type, at any depth, and kill pretty consistantly.

Here's a tip if you decide to trap them. Don't trap the hills. It's futile. The hills are where they push the excess dirt up and out of their tunnels. The dirt pushing up will set off the traps well before the mole gets there. Use your heel, and press down the tunnels about every 10 feet or so. Check them the next day. The ones where your heel print gets pushed back up are the active tunnels. Place your traps on those tunnels.

Set traps on the preimiter of your area, and in the center. Once you trap out the center, you cant stop them at the perimeter if you are diligent.

Also, I know this sounds stupid, but a lot of people confuse mole hills with crayfish mounds. If the mound looks like a little volcano with a hole in the top, it's a crayfish mound, not a mole hill.

Good luck. Moles are industrious little critters.

 

[oosik]

We have pocket gophers. I've used traps and caught as many as 40 in one season. Does seem to help for a couple years. I have a home-made "drag" that I tow behind my ATV to level out the mounds. I see no permanent solution in my situation - its simply an on-going battle.

 

[mapper]

Moles form a network of deep tunnels that can cover hundreds of acres. While they are somewhat antisocial, when you kill one they are quickly replaced by the neighboring population. While your acre or ten may only support a few individuals you may still trap a huge amount as the replacements move in.
My next door neighbor has trapped well over a hundred over the past years and has not come close to reducing the population. I am happy if I can just keep them out of the yard and garden.

 

[texasranger556]

http://sbigelow.freeshell.org/MoleTrap/Mole.htm

 

[AxleHub]

The biggest draw for moles in our area is white grubs. And white grubs like non-sandy soils that are somewhat moist - which means lawns. We also have gophers who love rock borders and rock walls as well as the bird feeder seed droppings and "comfortable ground" (not hard pack clay or dry sand). Often you can find gophers like to use mole tunnels and then create exits from them. I tried lots of mole/gopher pellets with modest success. I tried traps with less success. And then I discovered something else. Its a smoke bomb type product designed for gopher and mole eradication.

Here's what I do - don't step on the tunnels like you know you want to do LOL. Find exits that gophers may have created and put a small wood block or flat rock over the hole. If you have slopes - even better - you put the smoke bomb product at the very lowest location and light it and the smoke works its way thru the tunnels until it either can get out of the ground or until its all consumed. Gphers and moles are both air breathers and they breath in the smoke and it kills them in place.

Now dry weather seems to drive them deeper or into surrounding woods - because like all of us they seek easy work not hard work - and dry hard ground is hard work. All you have to do is water an area over 2 days for an hour or so each of those days - and you'll notice they again come close to the surface and you can set up a smoke bombing to get them before they can reproduce again.

No - "caddy shack" doesn't work with an exhaust hose unless you only want a little benefit - because exhaust fumes are heavy not light - so they don't travel the tunnels in the same way or length. What do these smoke bombs look like ? come 4 or 5 to a pack - about 4 inches long and maybe 5/8ths inch in diameter. Then the next day after I take my scut tractor and drive the yard with a single intention - to drive over the tunnels to compress them back down and also save the lawn from getting torn up or torn out when grass cutting or air dried roots from the tunnels exposing the roots from the underside.

Works really well any time of year.

 

[Texasmark]

Seems we all have our pests. Mine are primarily Armadillos and at times Skunks, but nothing like the them. My place has an abundance of earth worms and that's their main food source. Dig holes in the sod and just make a big mess wherever they are.

 

[MossRoad]

Moles don't care if the soil is hard or soft, but their dinner does. When the soil dries out, the worms and bugs go deeper. The moles follow them down. When it moistens up, the food comes up, and the moles follow. Also, moles don't hibernate, they just go deep.

I think I read somewhere that moles have about twice the red blood cells per measure as humans, so they can get by with half the oxygen in the air as humans do. They are strong, too. It said if a mole was 6' tall, it could go into a parking lot, stand between two parked cars and shove them apart. Yikes!