Hope for a snake to find your yard! We had a terrible mole problem here until the year a milk snake took up residence in our yard.

I use mousetraps for all the small critters, i.e., chippies, mice, moles, voles. On the down side, I also catch frogs and toads :(

Would love to hear about a less bloodthirsty method! Snakes sound good...

I have the perfect method -- although I doubt it'll help anyone else. Just get a mixed breed dog (golden retreiver, black lab and who knows) who loves to eat them.

We try to take them away, but she knows that and swallows them. Very effective at reducing the vole population!

Small windmills vibrate in the ground, they say that eliminates them. Have not tried it yet, but will.

my husband and I fought moles for several months with no results. I had a thought that worked well. We place our dryer lint in the main holes and covered it up, hoping they wouldn't like our smell, we haven't had a mole since. I guess they thought we moved in, so they moved out!! Hopefully this will work for someone else.

We too have a dog. She is a female Dalmatian. She stands over the tunnels like a fox and then quickly digs down to them. Most of them I get away, but a few she eats. We also have a resident king snake, but he does not to keep the population down like the dog does. With 10 acres, we never really get rid of them, just deal with them year after year.

Both moles and voles dislike the scent of castor oil. Home improvement stores sell products with this ingredient that can be sprayed on your lawn and garden.

My garden neighbor insists the gummi bears protect her root crops from voles. This is something that even Google has never heard of. She says a local market farmer told her about it. Go figure.

The "Vole Patrol" (hehe)

Say, noinwi, could you loan those three mousekateers out to me for about a week or two? Don't have a vole problem but I do have a chipmunk problem. Used to have feral cats in the hood but since they left dwarf rats have moved in.

tj

Have you contacted a Nuisance Wildlife Control Operator in your area?

When I am not in the garden or photographing the birds of Wisconsin I am a wildlife control technician.

Voles are a huge pain and can cause large amounts of damage to a lawn. Chipmunks don't cause as much damage but like to burrow under garages or sheds and will eat up the garden.

I am not saying home remedies don't work but by the time you find one that works for you you could of had it taken care of.

Just my $0.02

Adopt a couple cats. My cats LOVE to catch chipmunks, moles and voles. And despite all the bad press to the contrary, my cats don't kill "tons of birds." Between my five cats, they probably kill less than 10 birds per year. Rodents must be tastier. (YUK!)

Drop mothballs or amonia down the hole...I probably wouldn't mix the two--

Mothballs are carcinogenic and should never be used in a manner other than what is on the label.

tj

I have fought this war for years and tried everything like vibrators, castor oil, warfarin gel, smoke bombs. Worse than Bill Murray in Caddyshack.

Now I have NO PROBLEM with moles. Gempler's sells a scissors-type stainless steel mole trap. I bought six of them and I continue to trap moles successfully without any bait.

You just find the main burrow which you can tell because the tunnels fan out from that one place, which in my case is at the wooded edge of the garden.

Place the traps in a fan shape overlapping along an arc where the active tunnels have been. In a day or two one of them will spring and the mole problem is over.

What I have discovered is that it is often just ONE mole that does all that damage. If you can get that one, that usually takes care of business for about three to six months.

Other mole traps were completely ineffective and a waste of money. These WORK.

We bought a spike thing that you push in the ground it lets off a sound every now and then that apparently moles do not like (bought it from Menards) humans can hear it, but its not that loud, we had them creating tunnels all over the grass in out lawn in the middle of last summer, the lawn looked really bad. Anyway, they have now all gone either due to the spike or the fact that one day my dh was outside saw that the grass moved near one of the tunnels and stamped all over it like crazy!!!!! moles were no more!!!

"Mothballs are carcinogenic and should never be used in a manner other than what is on the label. tj"

Whew.... and like them on cornflakes...... :)

So... one can only get cancer by using them as DIRECTED??

Goodnight.

...and good luck. Sounds like you'll need it.

Even acute exposure to naphthalene is not good. Per the EPA:

"Acute exposure of humans to naphthalene by inhalation, ingestion, and dermal contact is associated with hemolytic anemia, damage to the liver, and, in infants, neurological damage. Symptoms of acute exposure include headache, nausea, vomiting, diarrhea, malaise, confusion, anemia, jaundice, convulsions, and coma."

Chronic exposure, of course, is worse.

tj

Get a real life tj.

Best Wishes.

Maybe that's why the mothballs work so well. Smart critters! Good sense of humor, northerndaylily~~thanks for the enlightening info, tsuga~~

Appreciate that Elvis.. someone reconizing a humor slant.. :)

So I 'took off' enough.. how do I deal with "vvvoooolles"?

I use a tunnel.. or cracks where only THEY can feed on the poison bait. Close to house under the deck.. BEHIND mulch sacks... in pipe where BIRDS wont go. Get only those creee-atures that way.

Even nailed one with a pellet gun last summer.. sunning too long it was... sure was surprised to see that.

Then.. the plastic traps via Fleet Farm.. black ones set to go off with a breath... peanut butter or similar.. again.. where NO birds can get in them.

LOVE my house wrens I do....... :).