Treatment Options

Boy oh boy, - nothing fixes you in place - mouth agape, like the sight of gopher mounds in your yard! It's so frustrating to have a bunch of pocket gophers or moles ruining your yard. A troublesome gopher can chew through the roots of your shrubs, wreck havoc on your lawn and even possibly damage buried utility cables or PVC pipes. If your yard needs a little once-over for gophers, call Janus Pest Management. From parks to parkways -we do it right!

Successful trapping or baiting depends on accurately locating the gopher's main burrow. We locate the burrow with a gopher probe by probing about 8 to 12 inches from the plug side and about 6 to 12 inches deep. To find burrows, we first locate areas of recent gopher activity based on fresh mounds of dark, moist soil. Fresh mounds that are visible above ground are the plugged openings of lateral tunnels
Qualified Licensed Professionals

Janus Pest Management services both residential and commercial clientele and are fully accredited by the County of Los Angeles Agricultural Commission to perform pest control services in three categories:

  • (A) Residential, Industrial and Institutional
  • (B) Landscape Maintenance
  • (C) Right-of-Way.
Mole mounds Gopher & mound  
Impact Concerns

Gophers, moles and ground squirrels are among the most common causes of landscape and turf damage. The mounds, holes and tunnels they make can be unsightly, damaging to turf, shrubs and trees and even pose a serious trip-and-fall hazard on athletic fields. They can also compromise hillside slopes and cause damage to underground utility cables and irrigation systems. Many species of ground squirrels carry fleas which can transmit a bacterium responsible for plague. In wild rodents this plague is referred to as sylvatic plague. When transmitted to humans by the fleas, it causes bubonic plague and pneumonic plague.

Identification

Since gophers and moles spend most of their time underground, they are hardly ever seen. So one of our best identification methods is to examine the dirt mounds that almost always accompany their activity. Pocket gophers may construct one to three feeding mounds per day, shoveling dirt out to the surface, forming crescent or fan shaped mounds. This helps distinguish them from mounds made by moles which are volcano shaped.

Moles are loners and occupy a large home range -- two to five moles per acre is common. Moles burrow just beneath the surface, "swimming" through their hunting tunnels searching for worms, grubs and other insects. The soil is usually pushed up in ridges so that the runway can be seen on the surface. To determine which runways are active, poke a small hole in the runway. An active runway will be repaired within a few hours.

Ground squirrels are easier to identify, they forage above ground during the day and will chirp to communicate. The larger softball sized borrow entrances remain open and have significant tailings leading from them.