The idea that we have degraded the native habitat for gophers and thats why they eat crops sounds innacurate to me. My property is surrounded by thousands of acres of pristine wilderness preseve on one side and a developed town on the other side. Hiking through the wilderness area theres very little gopher activity. You see the mounds but its just not very much. Then you go into town and theres hundreds of them in the park thats being irrigated and in yards and everywhere. Even my own lot, half of it is untouched and the other half I grow things on. Of course they are attracted to the side full of tender green tasties being irrigated.
For the first few years here I never cared about gophers. I would tell people they dont hurt anything, and I let them be. At the same time I was planting more trees and laying more irrigation lines down and building up the orchard. After about 3 years the trees started growing nicely and things were starting to look good and of course gopher damage started happening. Trees would get damaged and die or get severly stunted. Theres even a few trees here still stunted from being damaged by gophers 3 years ago. So I started using gopher baskets, weaving them out of half inch chicken wire and planting trees into those. It helped to prevent trees from being killed but the same thing happened, trees would still get damaged and stunted because the gopher will just eat everything thats outside the cage. So finally, after meeting up with Simon and hearing it from him and my 70 year old neighbor, I needed to start trapping and killing them or the damage would continue.
So I got macabee traps and learned to trap them. It wasnt very successful at first but after a year or so of practicing and then switching to smaller traps, my success rate went way up and that year I killed around 50 gophers and cleared my 2 acre growing area. The next door neighbor has a lawn and it was full of gophers so I helped him clear those out too. Now we still get gophers fairly often but its 1 or 2 at a time and they are easy to spot. When you clear out a gopher, you need to kick over their mounds so theres no old mounds around. That will help you know if its new activity or old activity. Whenever I see new mounds, its like a routine, go get the trapline traps, find the tunnel, dig a hole and open both sides of the tunnel up with a hori hori knife and insert the traps. Stick a weed in there and cover the entrance with a rock and dirt to block the light. I always get them now before they have a chance to damage anything. No more dead or stunted trees. And the numbers are low enough its obvious if theres a new gopher in the area. And its easily maintained at or near zero gophers. Ive got around 4 acres now totally cleared of them and have not had any damaged or dead plants in years. The benefits of doing this for me far outweigh any kind of benefit they may provide. I have doubts thst they provide much of any benefits to be honest. That sounds like wishful thinking. And planting extra food for them to eat hoping they will leave alone the other things sounds like a recipe for mass breeding and amplification of the problem.
Not to pee pee on the parade, Im just being honest because when things get posted on the internet then they get repeated. So Im throwing out my opinion on this and people can get a variety of opions and decide what to believe and how to procede with these pests.
