Originally Posted by venturabananas

Andrew, I'd rather have gophers than banana bunchy top virus! No chicken wire cage is going to keep BBTV away from your bananas in Hawaii. I'm just jealous that you're moving to Hawaii.

Back to gophers, I finally won a two-year-long battle with one. Now, admittedly, I had no experience as a gopher hunter prior to this. I tried Macabee style traps and he just buried them (though I did get a smaller, dumber gopher in them). I tried poison bait, and maybe it made him feel ill, but it didn't kill him. I tried "Gopher Goo" to no avail. I went so far as to plant catnip in my yard to attract the neighborhood cats so they might get him, or at least scare him away. Every time I thought I'd finally done him in, or he'd died of old age more likely, he'd open a new hole in my yard. Two days ago, he dug out a new hole under my fig tree, where I think he's been living for months. I tried a different kind of trap, a Cinch Trap. Much to my surprise, I found him dead in it the next morning. It was a bitter-sweet victory over my old nemesis. But boy was he a big gopher, living on that upscale diet of fig roots!

If you haven't tried the Cinch Trap, it's worth considering. You don't need to do all that digging into the main tunnel. You just dig out the plug of the hole, insert the trap, and leave the hole unplugged. When the gopher goes to plug the hole, he triggers the trap. It goes against everything you will have read about using Macabee traps. But the proof is in the pudding.