Pest Control Temecula. Gophers and Gopher Removal Services
What do Gophers Look Like?
Gophers are medium-sized rodents that average 6 to 10 inches long. Their fur color can vary in color from shades of black to various shades of brown. The full name of the gopher found here in Temecula is the Pocket Gopher. It gets that from the fur-lined pouches outside its mouth which are used to carry food and nesting material to its chambers 4 to 6 feet below ground. Some of those chambers are used for food storage, resting areas, to store their waste material, some are used to store dirt they haven’t pushed above ground yet.
It’s a Battle to get rid of gophers?
What Do Gophers Do? They dig, that’s all they do! Gophers are well equipped for digging, with big and strong forequarters, large clawed front legs, fine short hair that won’t cake up, small eyes and ears and highly sensitive whiskers and hairs that help them move about in their dark home. It has been found that a gopher can move up to 1 ton of dirt in its life time. Their neck is short; they have a flat, small head. Their lips can close behind their large incisors to keep the dirt out of their throats.
Their tunnels and burrowers are well set up for their lifestyle. They build chambers 4 to 6 feet underground for resting, raising their young, for a bathroom, for food storage and a sump type hole to help carry water out of the tunnels.Gopher’s tunnels can be a few inches to a few feet below ground and several hundred feet in length. When gopher pushes unwanted dirt out of its burrow the mound it makes will take on the shape of a horseshoe.
What do Gophers Eat?
You probably didn’t know but gophers are Vegans, vegetarians. They feed on plants such as weeds, grasses, plant roots, and bulbs, tubers types roots are a favorite, like potatoes, carrots and peanuts. Just about any underground plant stems or roots. Gophers eat the roots and vegetation they find while digging their tunnels. If they dig about ten feet and if they don’t find any roots they will close off that tunnel and start digging in another direction. If after a few days of digging and not finding roots to eat they will move above ground and go find another place to hang out. Sometimes, on the rare occasions they go above ground, they will do a little foraging and drag vegetation into their tunnel. What Eats Gophers? Gophers spend most of their time underground in their burrow systems. The most effective predators of gophers are those that are strong diggers. The gopher’s most common predators in Temecula are coyotes, skunks, bobcats, Owls, hawks and some snakes. Since gophers seldom leave their tunnels during the day but do leave their tunnels at night, the Owl, which hunts at night is the most successful Predator of gophers.
Gopher Breeding.
The gophers here in Temecula usually breed twice a year, in the early spring and late fall, but if conditions are right, like plenty of food and water usually found in landscaped and regularly irrigated areas , they will breed 3 or 4 times a year. The average litter size is determined by how well feed the females are. But the average litter size is between 4 and 6 pups. Since gophers are solitary creatures, after the pups are big enough the dominant adult gopher will force their mate and the young gophers out of the burrow. This usually happens in late summer or late fall. That is when you will see an explosion of new activity within and area as those forced out go to establish their own territories.
Signs of Gophers- Gopher extermination Temecula, Ca.
Gopher Feeder Holes.
Gopher Mound.
Burrowing and feeding activity of gophers is the most noticeable sign you have a problem with them. In a newly gopher infested property the mounding is what you will see. As you can see from the picture the mound takes a horse shoe pattern. That open end of the horse shoe is where you will find the tunnel that the gopher used to get to that spot. 6 to 12 inches from that area you will find the gophers’ main tunnel and that where you need to get to either baits or set gopher traps.
The smaller holes you see in the pictures are called feeder holes. You can see how the grass was eaten around the holes. Some gopher stuck its head out of that hole and munched a little grass, and then it went back down the hole and plugged it with dirt to keep snakes and water getting into the main system.
Sometime mounding and those feeder holes will stop showing up. That doesn’t mean the gopher is gone. It is not unusual for activity stopping for a few days or weeks if the gopher tunnels and burrows are all set up. They go into a maintenance period where they are just fixing things up. They may be pushing dirt into the numerous chambers they build or they may be using the dirt they are moving to fill in tunnels they are not going to use anymore.
In a property that has had a gopher infestation; it is not unusual for another gopher to take over the old tunnel systems it finds. In that case you may not see any mounding for quite a while. You may also find that many of the old tunnels have been filled in by the new gopher. This leads to the possibility of getting false reads as you are probing the ground to find the one tunnel being used on regular bases.
Gopher extermination is a difficult process and getting rid of gophers usually becomes a process that can include baiting and trapping. You have to find the main tunnel the gopher is using first. That’s the only tunnel that gopher will travel every 24 Hour. The tunnel for the feeder hole or the tunnels they use to push dirt to the surface are seldom revisited so baiting or setting traps in the tunnels connected to those area will be useless. For a good gopher removal service the gopher exterminators we send out are trained to find that main tunnel.
For any Gopher Pest Control Services in Temecula Ca, give Wheeler’s Pest Control a call. One of our gopher exterminators would be glad to talk to you about how we can get rid of gophers for you.
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