So I have these moles digging little tunnels all over parts of my yard. The ground becomes spongy and raised a bit, but you can tamp it back down and it sinks in farther than the regular ground that’s about.
In the film, The Great Escape, when the prisoners dug the tunnel out to the edge of the camp, they had to find something to do with all of the dirt which they had excavated. I recall that they would walk about the exercise yard and slowly leak the dirt about.
Now as far as I’ve been able to observe, my little molemen prisoners have not been releasing dirt back into the yard during their daily exercises. So what happens to the dirt from their tunnels?
That’s the thing, there really aren’t any lawnmower-killing mounds of dirt. Nor have there been little toy dump trucks driven by Stuart Little backing up to my front yard.
Well, Zenster may be on to something. Either the little rascals are scattering the dirt about the yard when the cat’s not watching or they are packing it away somewhere.
Is the soil relatively loos in the yard? They could just be packing it down as they go. Not necessarily digging separate tunnels to store the dirt in (God, that sounds so like some government program) but storing the dirt in the very tunnel that has been dug if you take my point.
Maybe The Rats of Nimh are involved? Have you noticed any tiny 1920s style dirt-disintegration rays in the yard?
In reality, the moles have tiny little jack boots that they routinely wear in order to trample down the friable residue of their nefarious excavations. See if the neighbor kid’s GI Joe footlocker has been rifled. It’s always a sure sign.
Have you never seen a mole foot? They are much too wide at the end and their legs too short to fit into a jack boots! And even if they could don some form of trampling footwear (like the iron cleats featured by their kin in that weird 60’s movie SHREW) a mole would soon become trapped in his burrow.
No, moles are much more clever. Growing up in Seattle the only way to get rid of them was to pour 1/2 can of calcium carbide in the hole, add water and wait for the gas to come out the other side. Even then many were equipped with protective gas masks which, upon close inspection, bore the telltale outline of a rat’s head. When our house burned down and we were digging a new foundation we were quite startled to find a small but efficient city of rodentia/insectivora flourishing about 10 feet below the lawn. With the disruption of the city, 30-40 moles dressed in full field plate and armed with razors on their foreclaws advanced upon the bulldozer which quickly crushed the uprising. Numerous smallish, but regally dressed rats could be seen making a break for the woods close by.
As we later looked through the city we discovered hundreds of tiny bags of dirt stored in a warehouse near a large mole hill. The bags bore the same rat insignia as the gas masks used by the moles, and each was stamped and addressed to a castle in Eastern Europe.
The destruction of the city also coincided with a marked decrease in vampire activity in the same Eastern European city. It was in CNN. I’ll see if I can find the cite.
Read Paul Brickhill’s book The Great Escape – the movie was based on it, but they couldn’t include everything.
– In addition to the trick of using the “pants bags” (They were made from long underwear, BYW. The prisoners gleefully cut them up because “nothing makes you feel so celibate”) they had other ways of disposing of dirt – the poured in down ;atrines, spread it in ceilings, and hid it under the sloping floor of the theater building.
– They didn’t say it in the film, but Brickhill writes that “when you try to repack dirt, it takes up a third again as much space”. When they tried the “mole” escape, they had a strictly limited path length if they wanted to avoid detection.
– They dug dirt out ansd shoeveled it into specially-made wagins that carried it back to the base of the tunnel. These ran on rails made from split boards, with wheels made from food tins and greased with margarine. There are pictures in Brickhill’s book, and they show it in the movie.
How your moles are getting rid of their dirt I don’t know. Maybe they read Brickhill’s book and are using his dodges (escaper Pat Reid, of Kolditz fame), argued against writing down escape techniques so they wouldn’t be used against Allies in future wats). Maybe they are using it as raw ,aterial for fusion reactions, and getting free power.
It’s a well known fact that moles are born with microscopic black holes embedded in their foreclaws. That’s where the excess dirt ends up.
CERN is currently running several experiments which are attempting to measure the Hawking radiation emanating from the moles. There is even some speculation that moles can be rigged up as a neutrino detector.
Mole damage appears to be nothing more than a softening of the ground and some modest bumps, or none at all, near tunnel entrances. Piles of dirt are not around, and it often looks like the dirt was excavated.
The moles are probably squeezing through the dirt, compacting the areas around them. This is why many tunnels near the surface have uplifting.
If they tunneled a la Great Escape, there’d be no uplifting.
I would like to find a mole trap that makes the mole suffer for ages. I hate my moles, although I think there’s only one. We paid $900 to have our backyard redone, and the mole must have though it was reno’s to his house, and invited some friends over. I was told by one SD’er that the best way to get rid them is to put a quarter in the ground and whack them really hard when they pop up. If that doesn’t work, don’t try the little dynamite things, my friend got her fence and trees burnt down from that, and my friendly mole stuck it out with it’s pile of dirt two weeks after I tried. I now have traps, although they may have 3-6 ways out of one mound of dirt.
tip: Moles eat grubs. So if you don’t mind poisoning your whole yard with a Grubex ® type grub and insect killer, then pick up a bag. Once the grubs die off, moles move on to better eatuns over at Billy Bob’s Lawn O’ Grubs. There are ‘organic’ grub killing options, too - Hard to find though.
note: I have a great low-maintenance lawn and I never use insect killers. I have a few moles here and there (I know there are more than one because I find one dead in my pool about every 10 days)
tip 2. Moles don’t like people activity. As soon as we start using the yard, or doing alot of cutting and gardening, the moles move onto to quiter places. Right now it’s Molesville around my yard, because our summer parties have ended and I’ve been busy doing everything but yard and pool stuff.
Philster, a site on moles (something from OSU) mentioned that some people try and get rid of moles by killing their grubs, but that moles’ diets actually consist of mainly earthworms, so killing off the grubs doesn’t really affect them (and can poison your soil).
The moles don’t actually bother me much, but my next door neighbor, who is more of a yard guy than me is setting up border checkpoints of stainless steel death. I also like my chipmunks and rabbits, otherwise I’d just get an outdoor cat. And I love the family of deer that I saw crossing the street this morning (but not on my property). I’m not sure if I’m living in the 'burbs or on the site of a bambi movie.
ShibbOleth, I’ve heard that too, but those lawn poisons probably don’t help the earthworm population much, so indirectly they probably drive away moles. I pretty much stick to organic fert programs, and recycle clippings back into the lawn, so my lawn is very very earthworm friendly, so no big surprise that I find moles regularly, plus the dead ones in the pool, so I have a fair number of them.
I never understood the stress over moles, because I have them, I have a nice lawn, and the really do seem to disappear when we use the yard alot.
Just drive them out with some bad music, a la US military and Noriega in Panama.
Or have moderator warnings read aloud over a speaker on an endless loop. That’ll fix 'em varmints.
Cats, lots of cats… ok, I’ve 3, but I’ve still had moles
(the real answer) The organic grub killing option (one of them) that Philster speaks of is called “Milkey Spore” and is available at just about every Agway or farm store in the land. I’m sure that you can order it online if you can’t get it locally. It is a bit more expensive in the short term, but since you only need to apply it once (ok, ok, again after 20 years or so…) the cost over time is relatively small. And it really does work. I no longer have any grubs, which leads to no moles… now I only have to do something about the darn crabgrass. I’ve tried boiling them, but yech…
Good luck.
-Butler
