GardenBanter.co.uk - Chipmunks or moles?

In article ,
(Duane Morin) wrote:

My yard is becoming overrun. I'm mowing the lawn, take a step, and
squish I sink a few inches or more into a hole. At least once I sunk
deep enough to reveal a junction of several tunnels, all burrowing
pretty deeply.

First question is whether this is chipmunks or moles. The holes in
the front hard are big enough that I would fit maybe 3-4 fingers down
one if I tried. When I fill them they are always dug out the next
day. Just last night I saw a pair of eyes and a nose looking back at
me but couldn't tell what it was.

In the back yard, though, there are much smaller holes, like maybe 1
finger sized. These don't seem to be nearly the same problem. The
front yard is beginning to look like a minefield.

What are my options? I figure that I can leave it and just keep
filling them, which is not only annoying but also dangerous since I'm
never sure how deeply I'm going to sink. A second option is a some
sort of repellant to make them take a hike...but probably into my
neighbors' yards. Third I could smoke em to death, but I'd really
rather not do that.

Options? Is there a way to get them to stop digging in my yard in
such a way that they don't just come back again next week? Without
killing them, preferably?

You almost certainly have a mother mole, who had one or two offspring, &
one of her babies is attempting to establish its territory nearby but away
from mom. The mother makes the big holes. Her one or two infants she soon
kicks out of her territory; they will make smaller tunnels away from her
as moles are territorial & will not tolerate other moles, not even their
own young, for very long. But a single mole can be quite productive & give
the impression of several moles. Since adolescent moles are constantly on
the look-out for territories they can have for themselves, if you catch &
kill a mole, with a very few days another mole moves in to the abandoned
tunnels, so you can never be rid of them unless the whole neighborhood
attacks them simultaneously.

Cats are usually pretty good at getting the adolescent moles at night.
Adult moles are sometimes too large or too clever to be caught. No bait
kills them; no repellant gets rid of them (nasty repellants cause them to
seal off a tunnel & make a new one away from the repellant). The only
effective approach, alas, is a scissors trap, banned in a couple states
but with an exception for personal use on your own property to take out a
mole. Moles know when someone has been dicking with their tunnels & the
traps fail only when they are set into tunnels in ways a clever mole
detected.

Howver, if it is not a Townsend mole (which can be intolerable; one mole
can make twenty-five or hundred large mole-hills in its little territory),
it is usually possible to live with a resident mole. If you stop damaging
its tunnels, the mole tends to stop making new tunnels after the first
great rush of establishing their runs. THE MORE YOU MUCK WITH THE TUNNELS,
THE MORE YOU FORCE THAT MOLE TO MAKE NEW TUNNELS. Once a resident mole has
a sufficient system to patrol for grubs & worms, they are not inclined to
keep excavating, until or unless the established runs provide too little
food. If you leave their tunnels unmolested, they patrol them daily, & if
they find enough food, they only maintain the existing tunnels & don't add
new ones at any great rate. "Later" excavations will be rather deep in the
ground, well below root systems, these being bed chamber & storage
chambers for beheaded worms & crippled insects (a chamber of horrors if
you're a grub).

Here's an article on living with a resident mole:
http://www.paghat.com/mole.html

The mother mole will tolerate her mate for about a day or two, & her young
are capable of taking care of themselves even at birth, so she doesn't
tolerate them much longer. So you rarely experience more than one mole at
a time -- they truly hate each other, & will duel to the death if you ever
could catch two at once & put them in a box together.

Some gardens (such as woodland gardening) are actually "improved" by the
workings of an excavating mole. The increasingly formal a garden, the less
the gardener may find their workings "aesthetic" though they're really
doing no harm. Their ARE times a resident mole really cannot be
accomodated, but generally the only thing you have to get over is your own
annoyance over an occasional hill of expelled soil or entryway hole. Fewer
than one in a thousand moles eat bulbs (they sometimes push bulbs to the
surface to get them out of the way of tunnels, but the bulbs are undamaged
& easily replanted, & bulb-pushing isn't chronic & isn't done to bulbs
actively rooted). They are pretty radically insectiverous & do not attack
plants. But they do have individual personalities & taste preferences --
& bulb-eating has been reported. Such an unusual mole would have to be
gotten rid of for sure. But field studies have shown this behavior to be
very rare, & in the majority of cases, reports of bulb damage are either
exaggerations or poor observation or mere annoyance seeing the occasional
bulb pushed out of the soil. Baring such rarest of cases of an actual
taste for bulbs, they are doing your garden a service by removing harmful
insects. Eastern moles eat primarily harmful grubs plus a lot of slugs &
insects & worms. Western moles eat a higher percentage of worms, but also
a great many beetle & moth grubs & young slugs, etc. If they root around
in the roots of plants overmuch, it means you have harmful grubs, &the
mole is actually saving the plant's life by cleaning up the roots of the
threat.

I almost always have an Olympic mole in one or another part of the
gardens. Only once did one resident annoy me, pushing up
jack-in-the-pulpit bulbs while they are dormant. Most of the time I
wouldn't even know there was a mole in the vicinity unless I lift a
flagstone & see a bit of tunnel. But when a cat finally kills a resident,
& a new mole arrives shortly after to fill the void, the new arrival will
do some "remodelling" for a week or so, & I'll see the results of its
minor mischief until it's got things all tidy for itself.

-paghat the ratgirl

--
"Of what are you afraid, my child?" inquired the kindly teacher.
"Oh, sir! The flowers, they are wild," replied the timid creature.
-from Peter Newell's "Wild Flowers"
See the Garden of Paghat the Ratgirl: http://www.paghat.com/