dms@fluke.UUCP (Dave Sherman) (03/06/84)
both used for about 50 years by my grandfather's brother.
Method one (for the patient):
Pick a nice pleasant day and take your old .22 and your favorite
chair out into the garden. Sit there quietly and listen to the birds
and watch the beans grow and eventually the mole/gopher will push a pile
of dirt up somewhere, whereupon you shoot him. Of course if you miss,
you just have to wait for him to come back up again. Usually they will
push up some dirt at least one in a day so you shouldn't have to wait
too long. I know he actually got lots of gophers that way.
Method two (for the mechanically inclined):
Build a gopher gun. This was his backup plan if the gopher was
shy. The gopher gun sits in the tunnel like a gopher trap, but the
success rate is much better. It consists of a piece of 1/4" iron about
6" by a foot with a piece of pipe attatched to it facing down. Rig up
a trigger mechanism with a couple levers and a strong spring which will
strike the pin in the back end of the pipe when the gopher crawls
through his hole. It should be a hair trigger, much more sensitive than
the ones on normal gopher traps. A shotgun shell goes in the pipe, and
the whole thing is set up very carefully in the tunnel. The results of
an encounter between gopher gun and gopher should be obvious at this
point.
Both of these techniques are environmentally sound and dirt
cheap, and number one has the added advantage that I guarantee that
if you sit still in your garden all day, you will notice all kinds of
things that you never noticed before.
o
___________./ o
_ - ' / \/
/ O |
________/_____________________< from the land of slugs,
---Dave Sherman
...{decvax!microsof,uw-beaver,allegra,lbl-csam,ssc-vax}!fluke!dmslwall@sdcrdcf.UUCP (Larry Wall) (03/14/84)
When I was growing up in Washington (State of--lovely green place, that), our
nextdoor neighbor was a fireman. Whenever moles started popping up in the
yard, he'd haul out an old firehose, hook it up to the tailpipe of his car,
and run it down the hole for half an hour or so. Presto, no more moles
for half a year or so.
Just make sure they haven't been burrowing up under your bedroom.
Larry Wall
{allegra,burdvax,cbosgd,hplabs,ihnp4,sdcsvax}!sdcrdcf!lwall