I don't know if I'm looking for advice here as much as sympathy, but I do have a real question. I know moles don't eat grain-based baits, but is it possible that maybe sometimes they do?

So, here's the long tale of woe:

I noticed some holes in an a garden bed and later a couple of mounds, so I broke out the gopher traps and put a couple in tunnels, but I forgot to tie them in place, so one trap just disappeared, apparently towed down a tunnel by a rodent that wasn't immediately killed. I tried to find it and dug up what seems like 50 feet of tunnel (probably more like 15) with surface and deep runs with no luck.

More holes kept on appearing, but no more mounds, so I was thinking voles or rats, so I put bags of coumadin-based rat, mouse and vole poison in all the holes. Some got eaten. Then I saw surface "tunnels" (bare strips of earth with everything eaten out of them through a strawberry bed and some lawn. Now I was really sure it was voles, so I put a couple unbaited mouse traps in the "tunnels" and also put a rat trap in one because the channel through the lawn seemed big for a vole. The next day, I had a rat (my rats are native dusky-footed woodrats, I think). Do some rat species repeatedly follow the same paths through plants eating everything in their way like voles do? Who knew?

More traps, more bags of bait. And today, what do I see? A big dead mole lying on his back with no signs of being injured by a trap or attacked by a predator? What? Did I kill a mole with grain based bait, or did this guy just decide to come out of his hole and die of a mole heart attack? Maybe a gopher snake crushed him and decided it wasn't hungry? What the heck?

I think a gopher probably dug most of the tunnels and a rat family moved in, but I'm perplexed both by the channel dug through the lawn, which isn't something I associate with rats and how a mole ended up dead above ground in the middle of my garden.

Between the squirrels eating fruit, rats, mice, voles, gophers and moles, I really seem to have hit the rodent jackpot. I've probably trapped at least 30 this year (mostly squirrels and rats) and somebody's eaten about 40 bags of rodent bait from my various homemade bait stations, so I've probably killed quite a few that way as well.

Anyone have any thoughts on what killed the mole or on the channels in the lawn being chewed by woodrats? I'll settle for sympathy.