It's All Out War

My current nemesis

For perhaps the same reason our fruit harvest have been abundant this year, we have been suffering an invasion of moles beyond what I have ever experienced. Our front lawn has been completely torn up by their digging and rooting underneath the surface. 

Moles have been around pretty much every year that we have lived on this piece of property. Half of it has trees and is unmowed so they have plenty of places to thrive. They have occasionally snuck up to our front lawn and dug around but eventually the ground gets too dry and they move on to better locations and the wounds in our lawn will heal over. I tried periodically over the years to spread chemicals on my lawn to degrub it which is what they were after but it never seemed to work reliably. They would still come up and dig several holes and tunnels before moving on to better, more grub productive places. But this year, they never moved on.

When we first moved here, there was some that were living underneath our front sidewalk and were causing it to sink and settle at various weird angles that were a genuine tripping hazard. I flooded those out and drowned them or in one case, dispatched it with a quick blow with the back of my shovel. I eventually repoured the sidewalk when I was repouring the driveway and they remained only the occasional nuisance until this year.

Eventually they started tunneling under the sidewalk again and I knew it was time to get serious. I have tried using various over the counter baits meant to poison them but have never had any success. Despite the poison gummy worm brand or pelletized poisons, I would generally just find them dug up with the dirt from the previous night's activities. My neighbor told me to try castor beans. He uses them and swears by them so I gave them a try. I did have some success in that when I put a caster bean in an active run, they would abandon it but they generally would just go a few feet away and start digging again. I also noticed that my neighbor still had fresh hills of dirt on his lawn so I sought out other methods. 

The local nursery had two different poisoned baits. The nice person in charge said bait A came in a big bottle and was cheap but people generally kept returning to by more of it. Bait B came in a small bottle, was three times as expensive but nobody every needed to come back for more. I shelled out my money and bought a bottle of Bait B. The moles laughed at it and I would see it dug up in the previous night's dirt digging. Evidently the buyers of Bait B never returned because its effectiveness was laughable.

This time I went to the local ag supply store that generally stocks more aggressive products. I returned home with some flare like things that you light and stick down in their tunnels to kill them by gassing them. I used up all four and may have slowed things down but didn't completely work. I tried a second bag of them and again, they weren't entirely effective. I think they might have gotten one or two of the moles but they don't work over large run distances. 

Mole trap in ravaged front yard

So after spending some quality time searching the internet, I came up with the solution seen above along a small portion of my torn up front yard. According to reviews, they were generally the favored trap of professional exterminators. I bought a pair of them and went through a couple days of learning curve on how best to set them and where. Eventually I learned and on two successive nights, caught two moles in my front yard. I place them across an active run and compress the soil right in-between the jaws of the trap. The unsuspecting mole comes along and begins clearing out the compressed part of the tunnel which sets off the trigger and the business end of the jaws that stick down into the soil on either side of the mole tunnel and squeeze the mole to death instantly. After the second mole was caught, I have seen no new signs of activity in my front lawn for the last two nights so I may have got the last ones that the gas didn't kill. 

I'm going to give it a couple more nights and then maybe try other places. I have at least one out in my fruit orchard digging around. I don't really care about appearances there but don't want them to damage the root systems of any of my expensive fruit trees. I'm not sure if they would but I don't want to take any chances. I also have one more active one out in the vicinity of the new asparagus patch that I might attempt to get rid of as well.

Update: I did move them to my orchard and caught moles number three and four!