Gophers are one of the most devastating and ravaging types of burrowing rodents you can get, with the capability of destroying and causing damage underground that may be going unseen for a long time. Gophers can start tunneling starting from your lawn and enter beneath the property damaging the foundation in so many areas throughout your property. But make sure that before doing any actions to free these rodents, ensure that the culprits burrowing in your property are gophers.
What damage will gophers cause?
The trickiest part is that the gophers rarely come out especially during daytime and live primarily underground, to be rarely seen. In case you get a chance to see them, you can easily identify them with their large incisors, flattened stomach area, small ears, and eyes. They possess big front claws that are their primary and sharpest weapons to dig beneath yards and home foundation. They will serve as freeways for the gophers. You will see the presence of the mounds they leave after burrowing, which are usually between four and six inches high and crescent-shaped. The gophers enter beneath the homes from outside by digging throughout the property for many years, damaging the walls and foundation of your precious home. Gophers are usually solitary animals, meaning one per burrow. The exception to this is during mating season or when the female’s gophers have babies. These special burrow systems have a great built home underground. They have a nesting den, food storage, and even a latrine. The top layer of the ground acts as a ceiling for their burrowing tunnels. As gophers enter the beneath the house through foundations, they will easily find the water sources and come inside the homes through plumbing lines and find shelter under bathtubs, cupboards or inside the walls.
Gophers Carry Diseases:
Gophers are from the family of mammals and have the potential to carry rabies. Though they suffer from this disease neither show any signs, they are disease carriers and they can bite a person and pass on the infection. Care needs to be taken especially with kids at home. But as a matter of concern, rabies is not the likely disease that gophers can spread. They are also carriers of other dangerous diseases like the plague, hantavirus, and the deadly monkeypox. Gophers easily den beneath the bathtubs are most of them do not have concrete under them. After a few days of burrowing from them, the backfill from the tunnels leads to swelling in the walls and foundation. The gophers urinate in the soil and with the high urine content getting into the soil staining the foundation and walls. They not only create a horrible odor in the homes but weaken the property structure everywhere.
Home measures for getting rid of Gophers:
Flooding:
Flooding is a first plan to try getting rid of gophers. But you need to make sure that flooding gopher tunnels close to your property or leading into your foundations will cause water to seep in through the foundation and cause damage to the structure, or cause leakages in your basements. You may not easily find the gopher tunnel that is leading into the foundation of your property as you cannot judge it from the surface, so you will have to approximately flood the water down the visible holes by their mounds. In case you decide to take this approach then you need to pour the water very swiftly and vigorously. Keep ready plenty of water and flood the tunnels without giving any time for gophers to escape hoping they come out and you can capture and kill them.
Trapping:
Trapping is the final method for getting rid of gophers in your premises. This is the best option if you succeed in catching and in killing the gophers, but it may be the only solution if flooding fails. You can get the commercially available traps available in the market designed specifically for gophers. They should be placed right in the gopher hole, at the bottom of the hole. But you need to ensure that you place the trap in the burrow where gophers are active, which you can find by using a gopher probe. This can be done by pushing the probe constantly and slowly down through the soil about around a few distances away from an existing mound, in the form of a circle.
You can try these best methods to get rid of gophers yourself, but professional pest control companies like Hybrid pest Control in Salt Lake City Utah will use proven methods that guarantee to capture these subterranean rodents before they cause too much damage.
Gopher Control Tactics by pest control services company:
The pest control services companies like Hybrid pest Control in Salt Lake City Utah have special tools to trap gophers before they have a chance to turn your property into a moonscape. They use the most proven ways to get gophers out of the property. They will have special traps that are placed underground with a technique so that there is no risk of harm to any non-target animal. With no use of poisonous gas, no toxic or dangerous chemicals and no use of any explosives that cause further damage to your health and property.
Once the gophers become successful to get into the foundation and walls, they will begin to start to have their babies, and if not eliminated then generations will be born inside very quickly. Contact the trusted, best and proven company for eliminating gophers from your property. If you doubt that your property is breeding home for gophers and want to avoid the dangers mentioned above, you should get in touch with a pest control expert like Hybrid pest Control in Salt Lake City Utah before you end up with the family of gophers beneath your property. If any new mounds appear, don’t delay to schedule an inspection and find options for getting rid of the gopher problem in your property.
