War in the Swamp
There is one thing for certain when you live in a swamp; you will always be at war with something. This time it’s gophers. For the first time in two years, however, I am winning the war. I have used gassers and baits to no avail. In order to kill a gopher with baits, the varmint has to eat the stuff. When they’re digging and pushing dirt, they often cover up the bait in the process and don’t eat the poison and therefore don’t die. The trenches and damage continue.
With gassers, the deadly vapor must penetrate all the tunnels to effectively kill the pest. There may be as many as eight tunnels for the gas to fill and gophers can easily block the poison with dirt in a matter of seconds thus rendering the method ineffective.
The only way you can tell if you’ve actually killed the gophers with baits and gassers is that they stop trenching and piling up mounds of dirt. For two years, the dirt kept piling up and the gophers continued to dig. Gassers and baits may have killed a few, but never all of them.
Finally, a new solution—cinch traps. Why are these the perfect solution? First, they seem to work every time. The traps are easy to set and when tripped the result is a dead gopher. You have the dead varmint as evidence of the kill. When you open a gopher hole to set the trap, the pest will always try to close the hole back up. The result is one less pest.
I caught three gophers the first afternoon in a matter of just a few hours, one the next morning, and another two days later. I caught a sixth starting a new hole the following day and he is history as well. It’s been over a week and there is no fresh digging. In less than a week, and a lot less of my valuable time spent, and all the gophers appear to be gone. Even if they are not, I have the traps and there will be no extra expense to quickly and effectively solve the problem. Another battle won! As always, however, there will be other battles to fight. That is the way of the swamp.