Unintended Consequences

The gophers are back. (It’s not like they ever really, REALLY left!) We’ve had a “gopher guy” showing up about once a month, but it’s had little effect.

Almost every day there’s another mound of debris and a new hole.

I suspect they’re ALL interconnected. If we hooked up a smoke machine and started pumping the output down this hole, the whole yard would soon have smoke drifting up from a hundred holes, looking a lot like a battlefield from no-man’s land in WWI.

Two weeks ago they started showing up in the back yard as well, eating the roots and killing the remaining decent landscaping.

I don’t want to start dropping poison down the holes, since the hawks and owls would end up eating the tainted meat and I won’t do anything to harm my raptor friends. But I don’t know what else to do.

I did find some solar powered vibrating spikes that you can drive into the ground in or around their digging sites. They power up during the day, then spend all night tricking the gophers into thinking that something big is stomping around or digging nearby.

Cool! But what do I do when these “thumpers” start attracting sand worms? I don’t have any idea how to ride one, even if I learned it’s going to be a bitch to find a parking space for one, and I would imagine that they’ll do more damage to the lawn than the gophers.

Perhaps this plan needs more thought…