How To Keep And Prevent Gophers From Your Yard

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If you have a gopher problem, the first thing you’re going to want to do is make sure it’s actually a gopher causing the problem. The hills in your lawn, for example, could easily be caused by a mole too, but there are a few features that make them stand apart from each other. You can never really see mole tunnels underground to start with. Gopher tunnels, on the other hand, have visible mounds that follow the tunnel, because of the way the gopher kicks the material to the side.



These tunnels can be really huge too. The gopher will make different tunnels for different uses, and they’ll often be at different depths too. This works to keep stashed food cool deeper down, and also away from predators that might be trying to hunt something tasty out from the surface. These storage tunnels or chambers for food can be up to six feet underground, and the square footage of the entire thing that be as large as 600 feet.

There are a few questions that you should answer before coming up with a plan of attack. There are quite a few factors that will determine how you should go about this.

What time of year is it? If you're looking at mid to late spring or summer, you are going to have a family of gophers — mother and babies — and not just one gopher. That litter can contain as many as seven or eight young gophers, but usually contains just four or five. It doesn't take long for them to leave the nest — a couple of months, but it means that getting rid of them will be hard work. Getting rid of one is hard work. Getting rid of more than one is going to be a serious challenge.

Believe it or not, gophers actually provide humans with many benefits, which should also affect how you deal with them. We would always recommend exclusion methods -- the most humane option, we believe. Trapping and releasing doesn't work, not only because the animal is close to impossible to trap, but also because there are so many regulations surrounding their trapping, destruction, or release. In many States, you are only permitted to release the gopher on the land on which it was trapped, which really doesn't help you at all when you're trying to get rid of the damn thing.

The tunnels that gophers build work to aerate the land and soil. They don’t live there for long, moving from one place to the next, and other animals can sometimes jump into the old burrows, providing a chance for new life to flourish, for other forms of wildlife. When that doesn’t happen, the tunnels collapse down onto themselves. Stashed food is technically planted, allowing for new plants to grow, and the poop they leave behind, as well as the urine, will be buried down there, acting as a natural fertilizer. The soil will also take water better, becoming better hydrated and nourished, and that means that more plant forms will have an easier time growing there.

The best way to keep gophers out of your yard is to stop them from being able to gain access to what they are there for — food. Baskets can be created out of hardware cloth to protect bulbs and other plants from below the ground, where the animals are digging up from. You can also use mesh wiring and hardware cloth again to form physical barriers on top of the ground. That, combined with fences and perhaps a few repellents or deterrents (should you choose that) will work to get rid of the animals if you are persistent enough. You could also look at flooding the tunnel systems, but you will need to do so in such a way that enables the animal to make a fast getaway. You want them to leave, not die. You will also need to make sure that there are no babies in a nest, or the entire family will more than likely be drowned. The mother won’t leave without first trying to save her youngsters, and they won't be able to help themselves for a good couple of months after they are born. They aren’t even weaned for the first four weeks or so.

Read the How to Get Rid of Gophers page.
For more information, you may want to click on one of these guides that I wrote:
How To Guide: Who should I hire? - What questions to ask, to look for, who NOT to hire.
How To Guide: do it yourself! - Advice on saving money by doing wildlife removal yourself.
Guide: How much does wildlife removal cost? - Analysis of wildlife control prices.