The front yard is filling up with mole hills. How do I get rid of the little bastard?
There are several ways to go, but the two most effective are insecticide and noise. Moles eat bugs, and they find them by sound. So, if you douse the yard with Diazanon, the moles will go someplace else where the bugs are still alive. The other way is gentler, cheaper, and looks tacky as hell. Go get yourself some of those whirling plastic flower thingies. The whirring and squeaking transmits through the ground, and the moles can’t hear the bugs anymore. They’ll go live in your neighbor’s yard, where they can find lunch.
You can also buy poison that will kill the moles directly. I used to get paid to do this when I was in college. I used a hand-operated machine that placed the poison in the moles’ tunnels, they eat it, and die. Usually it’s pretty effective at getting rid of the pests.
See http://chppm-www.apgea.army.mil/ento/mpmh/chap10.htm
Warning: This site also has some gruesome instructions about traps which will either catch or assassinate your moles…
Get a cat. Of course you will have to let it outside, which brings up a host of other questions…
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- There’s little spring traps you can get that you stick over the tunnel, and the rod-shaped trigger sticks down through the dirt, into the tunnel. When the mole hits the trigger, a metal spike stabs down through the dirt, into the mole. I don’t know who makes them, and it seems that locally, only older-fashioned non-politically-correct garden stores sell them. The newer stores seem to mostly sell CD’s of “Music To Convince Moles To Maybe Leave Sometime This Year”.
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- That’s the easiest way I have been told to quickly, easily kill only moles. Because of the way they are contructed they work best when approached from one “side”, so the sly-dog way to use them is you buy two and place them a couple inches apart, “back to back” over the same tunnel. All this reminds me that I need to go score me a couple. >:)
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Put a mountain on top of them? 
Sorry, it just seemed somehow… wrong that nobody else had made that wisecrack yet
More seriously, we’re hoping that bulldozing will fix our minor problem. We just noticed some small round holes in the ground, near the stump of a tree that was felled by a hurricane last year, and we’re relandscaping the yard in a few weeks. Any tips on how to drive whatever is inhabiting the holes (may be moles, or other small rodents) away long enough that the equipment doesn’t squash any subterranean rodents into oblivion. I’d hate to think that my shrubbery was haunted by the ghosts of cruelly-murdered garden pests :eek:
(more seriously - I have nothing against whatever’s inhabiting those holes in the ground and would be delighted to scare 'em away before they get mushed into mulch. Perhaps I’ll try the spinning plastic flowers. I almost don’t care if they come back later, as they don’t seem to be causing any problems… ).
My cat is an accomplished mole killer. Get a cat. Take it outside. Turn on garden hose. Fill mole tunnels with water. Watch cat kill mole. Repeat as needed.
With some trepidation, I post this potentially less-than-useful advice…
What is the political affiliation of these Moles? Nazi by any chance? And for the biologists out there, how closely related are Moles and Groundhogs?
From the Great Domain of Locked Threads, here is a six page discussion of how to rid yourself of Nazi Groundhogs. A classic which is perhaps unknown amongst the newcomers.
Mama Zappa, if you’re in the swath of the Brood X Cicadas, the holes where your tree lived may be exit tunnels for cicadas. They’ve been sucking on roots for the last 17 years.
FOLKS!
Johnny, you don’t have to create Chernobyl, or bulldoze or anything like that. It’s very simple. Kill what they eat and they quickly move on. I use one application of nematodes each year and we have not had one mole in our yard since. nematodes are parasitic organisms that kill grubs and other insects moles eat. When they are dead…the moles move on. It does not take too long and is completely organic. I’ll never go back to any pesticide knowing that nearly every lawn ailment can be cured 100% organically.
Google nematodes…you’ll see.
I humbly apologize for hijacking this, but my very first thought was:
Dermatologist :smack:
When I was a kid we had a cat that would kill moles, but she lost interest when she was about 5 years old–looks like they can put up on ehell of a fight.
We switched to some nasty traps ca. 1940 that reall messed the creatures up, but since I was the one who had to deal with the traps (my old man was pretty clever) I discarded them as unusually cruel.
We switched to calcium carbide (yeah, the stuff they use in miner’s lamps). It makes a pretty nasty gas (acetylene) when you mix it with water and it did the trick nicely. Glad I never thought to light the gas!
But I like the nematodes idea, provided they can’t get into useful things, like ladybugs, pets or, hurk me. Crane fly larvae REALLY suck. I’d like to lose the moles as well as those suckers, but then who’d eat all the mosquitoes?
I was thinking more along the lines of going to your local fair, and finding a master Wack-A-Mole person.
Employ them to come to your house and mash the little critters.
Or ya could get your own Wack-A-Mole mallet and practice, practice, practice.
Nematodes - will not harm your pets at all. Trust me we have a few rugrats of our own who have been living with a nice, lush, thick lawn for decades and non of them are any worse the ware.
I was amazed at the potency these little bacterial organisms had against certain insects…I was pretty psyched when after only one application the moles were completely gone from our property with-in a month…Very nice
I thought “counter-intellegence agents”
My grandfather built a couple of mole traps based on a design created (or refined? Google is ambiguous about the device’s provenance) by a friend of his. They worked really well, though I doubt they’re legal, so this description is offered for entertainment and informational purposes only. Plus they aren’t “humane” by any measure, so if that’s a concern, this will be doubly useless for you.
Design goes something like this:
When finished, the trap is a concrete pad about a foot square and three inches thick. A metal plate is set in the top surface. Two openings, fitted with pipe, lead from the top surface through the plate and to the underside of the concrete pad. Between these openings, centered on the top and mounted to the metal, is the spring assembly from a mousetrap. The trigger end is directly above one of the two openings (A), and the snapping bar, when released, lands on the other opening (B). A flat, heavy slug is welded to the snapping bar.
The trap is put in place above a mole run. A piece of stiff metal runs down pipe poening A to below the trap and is hooked to the mousetrap trigger. This is the trip switch; when the mole hits the trip in its run, it causes the mousetrap on top to snap.
And then the heavy slug on the snapping bar hits a firing pin on top of the shotgun shell mounted in pipe B. The concussion in the run kills everything within several feet.
I can provide a diagram if you’d like, but as I said at the outset, this description is entirely academic because I assume such a trap would be frowned on by the authorities. Ascertaining the legality of this device in your area is not my responsibility.
(But I will say this: It works like a charm, and it’s poison free.)
<British comedy reference>
There’s only one way to get rid of a mole - blow its head off with a 1920s style death ray.
</British comedy reference>
You know- “mole” is a very interesting word. If you ask someone to tell what the word “m-o-l-e” means- they can (depending on their background) define it as:
Chemist/physicist- a measurement of chemicals.
Civil engineer- a type of breakwater.
Doctor- a beauty mark
Biologist- a small insect eating burrowing Mammal.
Spy- a special kind of deep undercover spy.
Cook- a mexican sauce with chocolate (pronounced different)