Since the last California State Mammal (the CA Grizzly Bear) was killed in 1922, I believe Gophers would be a good choice to succeed them, for sheer ubiquity, if nothing else.  Over the years, they have wiped out a veritable orchard of bare-root fruit trees in our various yards, so I feel your pain, Karen.  My dad used to favor the flooding method, but that was in the days when we had our own well and water wasn't sold by the cubic foot.  I don't know how effective it was, but it was fun for us kids, who got to handle the business end of the hose.  Since I don't participate in recreational killing of fauna, I've never actually initiated a gopher pogrom either, and basically have just suffered the losses of a certain percentage of landscaping.  However, this website from the UC Davis Integrated Pest Management Program offers some suggestions for a more aggressive approach, plus a good deal of background on the little varmints.  Good luck.

Thanks, Cabe. That's an interesting site with lots of gopher information (no magic answers, though!). I don't participate in recreational killing of fauna or flora, myself, but I do kill some of them, some of the time. I eat some of both. I can't see that it would help much to kill the gophers, though. There is a huge supply of them, and more would just show up. I have a fiercely focused neighbor who traps and kills well over a hundred gophers each summer, but still has them damaging her garden. I'm not that dedicated, and I don't hate them. I just miss having a garden. I temporarily gave up after the year they ate everything.

I think barrier methods are the only approach that might work well for me. Then I still have to think about above ground protection from ground squirrels. I don't know. It might not happen this year. 

Hi. I see it's just us again. I think moisture is key to composting here. We haven't ended up doing the sheet mulching method yet, partly because we had to rototill anyway or we'd never get anywhere, and partly because Harrison forgot we were going to try it! Any way, I still have the instructions and will give it  a try. We are starting to get a few tomatoes now.

I'd love to know what would happen if you gave sheet mulching a try, Stacey. I'll bet it would work without any tilling. People often doubt it, but I've never known of anyone who did try it and was disappointed. Tucson would make a good test place for it, certainly, but I think it's likely that it would be effective. It was developed in Australia.

I'm envious that you have tomatoes coming already. It's still too early to even put the plants out in the Rogue Valley. I hope I find time to dig some trenches and line them with hardware cloth, to keep the gophers out, so I can have a garden again this year. We've got good grower's markets around, but I like growing my own.

Gophers were a big problem in Edgewood, NM.  I planted a lot of trees for windbreaks and a small orchard.  Trees up to 2 inches in diameter were chewed off from underground, right up to the surface of the ground -- then another ten foot tree would just topple over.  It's very discouraging to have twenty or thirty trees just fall over, with no roots left, just after the weather starts to warm up nicely.

A regular garden was out of the question.  Raised beds with small-openning chicken wire barriers under them were a little more successful, but took a LOT of effort and materials.  Probably 1/2 inch mesh hardware cloth would have worked even better

I spent 2 years trying to gas them using lawn tractor exhaust, but that wasn't too effective and you had to run the tractor for hours at a time -- just idling.  The ignited flaming gas sticks didn't work even that well.   After that I tried trapping them.  I was trapping over 100 per year the first 2 years, but after that I was able to just trap gophers around the perimeter when the mounds showed up.

I avoided poisons because pets and other wildlife often eat the gopher carcasses. 

I did have a local coyote that started digging up the traps with the fresh kills.  He started sleeping under a pinon windbreak on one side of the front yard.  His digs made big canyons in the yard, but usually the empty trap with a little fresh gopher fur on it would be nearby.

I made a little elevated tray out in the back corner of the field and put the gopher carcasses there, and the ravens often carried them off withing an hour or so.  Occasionally neighborhood cats would get to them first.

Trapping gophers:

1. Tie a cord from the trap to an anchor post (a LARGE nail/spike works) that can be driven into the ground so the gopher doesn't drag the trap off down it's hole.

2. Tie a bright colored flag (surveyor's tape works) onto each trap anchor so you can see from a distance where you placed the trap.

3. Dig down to the gopher's tunnel and place a trap in each branch of it, then restore the tunnel as best you can.

If you have a dog that likes to dig the untriggered traps up you would be well-advised to put an old tire or other large heavy obstruction on the location.

You need ten to twenty traps, and you need to set out or move your traps about once a week.  Checking and moving traps twice a week is more effective, but not much more often, though sometimes you will catch gophers the day you set the traps out.  Less often means there will be decaying carcasses on at least some of the traps.  You will probably get one or two gophers each time you set out the traps for the first few months.

Make sure you use gloves that do not have strong human, soap, or hand lotion smells on them when handling your traps -- gophers start digging around the traps or filling in the tunnels near the traps when they associate the smells.

In less than 3 years after I stopped trapping the perimeter they were back in full force.

Ground squirrels:

Encourage owls and other raptors to perch on your property.  Get neighborhood cats to frequent the yard.  I haven't figured out how to get rid of them, but it helps to keep the populations in control.  A friend has a dog that is almost blind, and the dog seems to be able to sneak up on them.

Gardening and trapping gophers was an interesting distraction from sitting at a desk programming computers and writing technical reports all day.  It is remarkable how many technical problems' solutions come to you while you are doing something more mechanical like trapping gophers.

Hey Jim, great post on the gopher wars!  I had to laugh out of sheer rueful recognition, because it indirectly reflected other exigencies of NM life, like keeping the pipes unfrozen, planting in caliche soils, dealing with late-winter thaw and late spring windstorms, and keeping house pets from becoming part of the wild animal food chain, all of which seemed to demand a number of trial-and-error approaches before the usually only-partially successful solution was found.  We built an adobe addition onto an existing stone cabin in Cedro, about 20 miles SW of Edgewood (by road), between 1981 and 1986, and had to deal with all the rural NM idiosyncrasies so well documented by John Nichols in the 'Milagro Bean Field War'.

Out here in the Central California coastal region, gopher populations are fairly cyclic, with only about one bad population explosion every 5 years or so.  Even so, gophers have wiped out hundreds of dollars worth of my fruit and ornamental trees over the years, and made the concept of a traditional lawn laughable.

Cabe, an update on the gopher wars ---

I seem to be impacting the number of gophers in the neighbor's yards.  Their gophers make an excursion into mine so I set up traps near the fence on the new tunnels.  The neighbors are starting to run low on fresh gopher digs.

All the gophers I catch I feed to the ravens.  They now come by daily to see if I have any more goodies for them.  The last two years a pair have tried to build a nest in one of our ponderosas in late March.  I April we get our spring winds and the nest falls apart.  The ravens finally give up and then carefully spread the remaining sticks all over the yard.  I also feed the ravens any mice I catch in the house, but the neighbor's cats seem to have eliminated our squirrel problem and most of the mice in the barn.

I intentionally leave some large piles of branches around the yard and get a large variety of birds nesting in them.  They willingly announce the presence of large snakes in the area.

The other day I caught a kangaroo rat in a gopher trap -- he must have been reusing the gopher tunnels.