Service Summary:
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Grove Eco-friendly Pest Control will come to your home to do an assessment and provide a quote.
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We will rake out all of the pocket gopher mounds, allowing the grass to grow back and show us where the most recent activity is.
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One to three days later, your Grove technician will return to set traps in the most recent pocket gopher mounds, and rake out any new mounds again.
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We return one to three days later to remove any trapped gophers, reset the traps, or remove the traps if no gophers are present.
Pocket gopher mounds
Pocket Gopher Info
What are those big dirt mounds in my yard!? Not ant hills, not moles… It’s pocket gophers!
The Northern Pocket Gopher (Thomomys talpoides) is a true gopher, as opposed to the ground squirrels that we usually call gophers. They live almost their entire life underground. It would be a very rare sight to see a pocket gopher running around! Pocket gophers create extensive tunnel systems below the ground, pushing up the soil that they remove for their tunnels out onto the surface, creating crescent-shaped mounds approximately 40 cm in diameter. They feed primarily on roots. You may have noticed some plant bulbs mysteriously go missing if you are seeing the characteristic dirt mounds of the pocket gopher in your yard.
Pocket gophers are solitary animals. If you have a few mounds in your urban yard, you are most likely dealing with just one pocket gopher. If you are on an acreage and you have many “pockets” of mounds, you may be dealing with many more! One pocket gopher can create one or two dirt mounds per day.
Female pocket gophers will usually have one litter of 4-6 young per season. The young will stay with their mother for 5-8 weeks before leaving. This may be the only time they spend above ground as they move away from the mothers burrow and find their own area.
Pocket Gopher Control
There are two main ways to control pocket gophers. They can be poisoned with rodenticides (poison) or they can be trapped with snap traps. At Grove Eco-friendly Pest Control, we do not use rodenticides unless absolutely necessary. Grove Pest Control is currently working with wildlife scientists at the University of Florida to design a live pocket gopher trap for the relocation of pocket gophers. Until then, we must resort to lethal trapping. Lethal trapping is a relatively humane solution for the control of pocket gophers. To learn more about how to trap pocket gophers yourself, check out our blog post here. Grove technicians are trained and experienced with the most effective methods for trapping pocket gophers. We also rake out the pocket gopher mounds, allowing the grass to grow back quickly.
