A few days ago, I decided to get serious and learn about gophers. I read up on their habits. I even dug up about 30 feet of one gopher tunnel just to get familiar with it.

We discovered that if you unplug a gopher hole, the gopher will come back along to plug it back up, sometimes even within a half hour after you opened it. After they plug it back up, you can dig out the plug, which is usually 4-6 inches thick, and they will come back and plug it again. You can play this game over and over several times a day on the same hole. Using that game, we were able to nab a gopher with the pellet gun today while it was trying to replug an opening. Heather also bought a Gopher Hawk trap this afternoon, and by this evening it had caught a gopher. That’s two gophers in one day! We have reset the Gopher Hawk in another gopher tunnel system.  Now that I know how their tunnel systems are laid out and that I can keep reopening their holes and wait for them to replug them as a way of verifying that we’re dealing with an actively occupied tunnel system, I think we will get good at trapping gophers. If we can trap them while they’re in our lawn, then they should never be able to get all the way to the garden.

We’re feeling confident. We’ll see if it lasts.