Well, it was unlikely that the gopher incursion into the garden area would be a one time incident. Sure enough, the next morning there was a new mound by the pots along the fence. And like the first one, the tunnels had been backfilled adequately so that there was no hope of finding the runway and setting traps.
Again, on the third day, yet another mound appeared at the end of one of the raised beds, not too distant from where the other two had been. This gopher was very good about blocking the exits after he had excavated under the garden.
Our next door neighbor Charlie tried to help. He has been on an all out anti-gopher campaign and is determined to have a little lawn and some flowers by his house. Last I heard, he had close to two hundred gophers since the spring. The dead gophers are handed over to Pacific Wildlife rescue to feed the owls, eagles, hawks and similar critters they have in their care. Since the gophers have no respect for property lines, Charlie has extended his trapping to neighboring property to get the critters before they travel their underground freeway into his lawn. He hosed down all of the mounds and open tunnels he could see on our property. Usually, a day or so later, it will be easy to see where the gophers are active. Not so in this case. The gopher went into stealth mode and did not disturb anything above ground.
And so things stayed for a couple days. Then, this morning as I was walking around checking on how things were growing, the ground collapsed opening up clean access to the gopher runway. I put out the trap and hoped I guessed correctly from which direction the gopher would be returning. Later in the day, I found the trap sprung and one less gopher to be undermining things.
Of course one of his many relatives will likely move into his vacated tunnels in a day or so. This won’t be the last time.