"They took the bait!"
For the last month or so we've been finding small holes in the ground near the front porch where last year's gopher was busily digging until he was captured and um, "dispatched".
I was pouring topsoil in them, filling it in and replanting grass seed in an effort to plug the holes. For whatever reason I was thinking that the ground was merely subsiding and "filling in" the void left by the gopher every time I watered where I'd put new soil and seed. Then we noticed a neighbor's cat hanging around in the early morning hours staring intently at the spot where the holes were. Making a long story somewhat shorter, yesterday we saw that it wasn't the soil filling in the void, it was the voles that had moved in to the gopher's former residence. "Cool!" they said. "A prebuilt spacious multilevel home for us. Yay!"
A somewhat hurried trip to the computer for some research and a trip to Home Depot was in order. They don't have a lot for voles but they do have mousetraps and poison bait for mice in abundance so that will have to do for now. So I put out some mousetraps and, lacking anything else that the Oracle of Wisdom (i.e., The Internet) said was good, like peanut butter, I cut up a few green seedless grapes and baited the traps with that. Not five minutes passed and one trap had sprung and the hapless vole was wriggling in desperation to escape it's clutches. "Yay!" said DW "We got him!"
He later succumbed to drowning.
I pointed out that we had "got" one and it was doubtful that there was only one. A few hours later my caution was proven correct when I saw another one scurry out from one hole and into another. No other traps were sprung and I named the recently deceased vole "Adventuresome Andy" since he had failed to exercise any caution.
This morning I filled in all the holes again sans seed, just to let me know which ones were active. Sure enough, in a few minutes two were open again, I guess for ventilation. I then cut up some of the poison bait into smaller chunks and pushed them into a couple of the holes and placed one chunk near, but not into, one of the holes just to see if it would later disappear. Several hours later it did. Yay!
On the way back from a Dr. appointment (that's another post) I bought some peanut butter (chunky) for bait. We'll see how that goes and a follow up post will detail the results, if any. I'll forego the pictures though.
I do hope they like Jiff.
