that pic is a bit far away form the damage for me to interpret anything..

looks more like how robins upset mulch looking for bugs .. at this distance ..

if you find no tunnels.. why are you sticking with moles??

ken

Agree with Ken. Mole activity should result in raised tunnels around with piles of dirt along the way as they push up the dirt they dig while excavating making a tunnel. The tunnnels need to be flattened & the dirt spread out then check often for new tunnels to find the active ones. They move around a lot. The only really effective way to get rid of them is with the steel scissor traps which are now illegal in many places. Truly awful thing to do but not much else seems to work, If you have the traps, handle with gloves as human scent will scare them off - out of that tunnel. If any are caught in trap, best to bury them in that spot as seems to deter more for a bit. They must be territorial.

@Fori has a valid point. This time of year squirrels are very busy digging into my containers & making quite the mess. @ken_adrian Adrian MI cold Z5 point about Robins is true too. Those birds are very busy getting into nesting season & I see flocks of them on my grass & in flower beds scratching away. Another mess.

Westes, the picture is not sufficiently clear or detailed enough for an identification.

I updated the main photo with today's damage. Let me know if this photo is sufficiently clear to help see what is happening. Duplicating the photo here.

@ken_adrian Adrian MI cold Z5 I am sticking with moles because big piles of deep earth are starting to appear all over my garden, every day. Unless Mr Robin bred with Godzilla, there is no way that these large piles of earth are being placed there by birds. It might not be moles but would be small burrowing animal. The earth looks like fresh digging from deep under.

@Fori I have extensive experience with ground squirrels. Those typically have two to three well identified exit holes, and they pile dirt from excavation near those holes. These piles are TOTALLY different. They are smaller piles of earth appearing like a small volcano shape totally in the middle of nowhere.

It might not be a mole, but whatever it is would be fairly small, based on the size of the dirt piles.

A game camera sounds like a good plan. Can you point me to one on Amazon that might work well for this case? Those are infrared cameras to work at night?

I'm not sure what you think a camera might do. If moles, they are almost totally subterranean, rarely ever coming out of the ground. This is the primary reason moles are so hard to control - hard to catch what you can't ever see :-). So unless you mount the camera in one of their very deep underground burrows, I doubt you will see anything that will help you.

Much of CA has a big gopher issue and they also produce soil mounds and tunnels just like moles. But gophers damage plants, eating roots, shoots and fruits. If you have not noticed any plant damage, then it is probably moles messing things up. And that's pretty much all they do - mess things up. Unless their tunneling uproots a plant (something I have never seen happen), the only damage they do is to consume all manner of tasty soil organisms, good guys and bad guys.

Since they are difficult to catch and hard to lay traps for without excavating your entire back yard. the best plan is to ignore them. They are almost always solitary individuals and once they have consumed as much microfauna they can locate, they will move on

btw, moles seem to most active and their presence most visible after frequent rains, which loosen the soil for their surface oriented foraging tunnels. And rains also encourage all that insect life that is a mole diet. They are kind of a spring thing here as well but tunnel off to better real estate in the dryness of summer.

@gardengal48 (PNW Z8/9) What I am trying to figure out is whether this is a burrowing animal that has a hidden hole below each pile of dirt, or is this a burrowing animal that actually carried dirt to the location I see the piles. Everyone keeps tell me that if this is a mole I will see a hole under that dirt. I guess I need to clean out the area with a hose and get a better picture of that.

I don't mean the ground squirrels. I mean these adorable little turds:

They are all over the east bay.

GG, a camera isn't going to reveal subterranean critters--but it'll show if it's a non-tunneling culprit. Westes says there's no tunnels so...anyway cameras are fun.

I can't recommend a specific camera but if you have a Nest or something like that, they're good if pointed the right direction. I suspect the inexpensive game/trail cameras on Amazn would work--check reviews.

@Fori I have lived around tree squirrels here for 40 years. I know their behaviors very well. This is not the work of a tree squirrel.

Gophers. Very vexing. They often burrow among succulents without hurting them; many succulents have toxins and are not appealing to them.

Control is challenging; traps are the most effective, but it takes some practice to become proficient with them. I like the brand called ”gophinator”. Also, keep a pitchfork out in the garden…

@iochroma I bought a game camera on Amazon, so let's see if that can get set up by the weekend and capture something. If the burrowing is coming from below, maybe the camera will trigger as the soil moves or as the animal pokes its head out of the soil mass.

So is it correct that with either a mole or a gopher that there MUST be a hole below the piles of soil that keep appearing in random locations? I removed all of the soil from today and then watered the area down, and there is no hole below the soil mass. The plants look undisturbed except for being buried by the soil.

Here are today's piles of dirt, all placed fresh last night sometime after 2 am (I checked then).

Looks like mole digging to me. Sometimes the excavation holes are hard to find. But, there should be raised tunnels somewhere near if it’s moles. Very frustrating! It definitely looks like soil being tilled up & pushed out though so a burrower for sure.

I'm in NY, but I have a two unexplained mounds of dirt in my gardens, very similar to yours, except mine are on opposite ends of the yard! I am convinced it's chipmunks making the piles by excavating soil from the holes and tunnels they're digging nearby. This entire area was overrun with an abundance of chipmunks last year!

I have periodic issues with mole mounds in my garden. They almost always appear in planted beds and there are no visible signs of tunneling nearby. Moles can generate both more surface oriented tunnels they use for food gathering and deep tunnels well below ground that connect to their burrows and larders and act as highways through their territory. The surface tunnels may or may not be very visible but the deep tunnels, not at all. The mounds are just excess soil excavated during the tunneling process and depending on what sort of tunnels, there may or may not be an obvious hole associated with the mounds.

Since the moles are almost completely carnivorous, they do little damage to plants other than some possible soil and root disturbance. I have never noticed any plant damage issues in my garden as a result of mole activity and I just disperse the soil mounds as necessary. Moles are actually a beneficial presence in the environment if one can overlook the aesthetics of the mounds and tunnels.

Mole tunnels provide a runway for voles, which do eat plants roots, so mole presence is not entirely beneficial.

But they can also exist entirely independent of each other. You can have moles with no voles or voles with no moies. I have seen no evidence of any voles in my current garden but as noted, moles visit at will.

@gardengal48 (PNW Z8/9) Moles would actually be beneficial if they were working in the canopy of trees or hedges, but as soon as you introduce carefully designed landscaping, and especially when you have special soil in place, they are a nightmare.

I found an entry hole, and the size of it suggests I might be dealing with a gopher. Can I just live trap that with vegetables as the bait?

I will be tempting it with basil, mint leaf, and fresh radishes. If there are better baits please let me know.

I set a live trap by the hole I found. The animal did NOT eat any of the bait, and it simply piled more dirt to cover the hole and it started to bury the trap itself in the dirt. Would this be gopher behavior?

If trapping for gophers, try bating the trap with, lettuce, carrots, apples or peanut butter. If trapping for moles, gather some worms. And they apparently like the scent of peanut butter and are drawn to it even if they might not eat it.

Did you research trapping either of these creatures? Surface set traps are not going to catch either one. Most sources (including the CA extension service) recommend setting the traps well below ground in one of the major tunnels. And it is recommended to set two opposing traps underground for the gophers.

@gardengal48 (PNW Z8/9) That certainly sounds like a major hassle, having to dig out the ground and figure out a way to plant a live trap under the surface. Much harder than planting a tree even.

Live traps won't work.

@iochroma You mean specifically for moles? Why do they fail?

Live traps don’t work for either. Moles don’t come above ground, and won’t walk on wire; they only eat live food.

Gophers won’t walk on wire (usually), and are unlikely to be attracted to any kind of box trap.

Get a gophinator.

@iochroma Can you point to a style on Amazon that you think works well? The three types I see on Amazon are totally different designs. Looks like it would be dangerous to even handle one of these before you knew how to handle them.

gophinator.

https://ipm.ucanr.edu/home-and-landscape/pocket-gophers/pest-notes/

https://ipm.ucanr.edu/legacy_assets/pdf/pestnotes/pnpocketgophers.pdf

https://www.sacvalleyorchards.com/almonds/vertebrates/early-spring-gophers/

@iochroma Lots of gopher traps on Amazon, but searching for gophinator specifically does not turn up that brand:

https://www.amazon.com/s?k=the+gophinator+gopher+trap

@iochroma I am going for the "Gopher Hawk" system:

https://www.amazon.com/GopherHawk-Trapping-Wedge-Probe-GH-SET/dp/B00KXE6RKK