Botta's Pocket Gophers - A farmers headache!

 A common pest for vegetable, grape, or fruit growers is the pocket gopher.      They will tunnel throughout the orchard or fields and will pull the crop into their burrow to eat safely, safe from predators.  They are known at Botta's pocket gopher.  Here is a picture of a pocket gopher -with it cheek pockets full

They will also leave piles of dirt where they pushed the dirt out of the tunnel when excavating.  
Here are some picture of dirt piles in my vegetable growing area.    

They are very prolific and if there readily available food source, they will have up to 4 litters a year with up to 12 pups per litter.      They are also considered beneficial as they will aerate the soil with their tunnels and also bring minerals to surface for plants.   They are also voracious pests.   They cleared out an entire row of fennel last summer over 2 weeks.   They also love lettuce, peas, and carrots.   I had an entire row of carrots that I started harvesting and realized that every carrot was missing the bottom 2/3rds of each carrot because they had tunneled under the entire row and eaten the bottom of almost every carrot.

Common predators of pocket gophers are badgers, hawks, owls, fox and coyotes.   Barn owls will consume hundreds of pocket gophers in a breeding season and they hunt at night when the gophers will leave their burrows to eat.  

Another control method is to put poison in the holes, but the problem with poisons are that you risk killing predators who may come across a poisoned gopher and eat it, thereby ingesting the poison.   

Trapping is a common method as an alternative to poisons.   One trap is a Macabee trap.   I personally don't like them because they will not kill the gopher right away and cause it to suffer.     You have to tie the trap to a stake as the gopher will pull it into their tunnel before they die.

Here is a picture of the Macabee trap.

I use the Victor Gopher trap which will kill them instantly.   I want them to die, but I don't want them to suffer in the process.  The Victor gopher trap is so powerful, I think it would break your finger if it snapped on a finger.   

I had a gopher that was eating my Romaine lettuce so I found it's tunnel while I was harvesting.  I decide to set a victor trap.  I dug out the tunnel and put one trap on each side of the tunnel because I didn't know which side the gopher was currently located.   Here is picture of the traps.

I checked the trap the next day and was happy to see that the one on the left was snapped and it had a very large male gopher in it.   You can see how it snapped down on the gopher killing it instantly.   You can also see its large yellow teeth.      One down and probably 10 more to go.