A few months after moving into our cute neo-Tudor home in Ingleside Terraces six years ago, I was looking out my front window when I saw a startling sight: My neighbor Tom at the end of my driveway, holding a small rifle.
Tom was pointing it into the ground, right at the border between our two lots. We were new neighbors at this point, but I had gotten the sense from our few interactions that he was not the menacing type, so … what was he doing?
I told my kids to stay in their room and marched outside to find out. “What do you have there, Tom?” I shouted from behind the relative safety of a decorative garden wall.
“Shhh!” he yelled back. A moment later, his gloved hand lifted a dead gopher from the dirt.
The gun was an air rifle, and I’ve since learned it’s one of Tom’s chosen weapons against gophers, who start sticking their heads out of holes, scratching out messy dirt mounds, and tearing up gardens every spring in San Francisco. My chosen weapon against gophers, meanwhile, is Tom.
After watching me try everything from coffee grounds to poison pellets to dry ice, he offered to take control of my gopher problem, too — partially to keep the ones under my house from reaching his lush and expansive garden. (Tom’s retired, and his garden is now essentially his full-time job.) In the past few weeks, he’s set traps all over my yard. When my kids spot a new gopher dirt mound, they run to Tom’s house. “There’s a gopher here, Tom!” they yell.
But not everyone has a neighbor like Tom to do their dirty work.
As the rainy, cold season transition into a sparkling San Francisco spring, the city’s gophers are waking from their winter dormancy — gophers do not hibernate but stop being active in the wet months — and wreaking havoc on gardens all over the city. But nowhere are they more of a scourge than on the suburban, lawn-filled west side where I live.
Rodent biologists couldn’t estimate how many gophers live in San Francisco, and San Francisco Animal Care and Control did not respond to questions, but one look at the pockmarked brown mounds in my neighborhood suggests their number may be infinite. Forget parrots, sea lions, and coyotes — this time of year, gophers are the official critter of the city.
To protect gardens from the smooth-toothed northern pocket gopher — scientific name, thomomys rufescens — west side residents are willing to do just about anything. I asked my neighbors on Nextdoor to share their tips and techniques for eradicating the rodents, and the answers varied from the mundane to the downright absurd.
Eventually, though, most turn to murder — up to and including turning their burrows into tiny gas chambers.
Like so many gopher combatants before me, I first tried to get rid of them without spilling blood. I thought, this is their land too, right? Plus, pocket gophers, the ones burrowing beneath San Francisco, are pretty cute; the first time they saw one, my kids thought it was an escaped pet hamster. But after they eat your fledgling yucca tree or the huge sunflowers you grew from seed — literally sucking them down under the ground overnight, the monsters — you stop caring about how cute they are. You lust for their blood.
When Erin Clark moved from the Castro to the Sunset, she was warned about the gophers but thought, “It can’t be that bad.” Soon she realized just how bad it could be. She planted 200 tulip bulbs, and the gophers ate 199. Over her children’s objections, she graduated from putting hot peppers down the holes to a more permanent solution. “In the end, I had to move to traps,” she shared. She opted for the GopherHawk, which makes quick, humane work of critters — if you set the trap right (more on this later).
Julie Kriger of Ingleside has a more unorthodox method: Vicks VapoRub. “They absolutely hate the smell,” she said. “I smear it around gardening pots and the outer part of my yard.” She says people don’t notice the smell.
“Human hair clippings,” suggested Ly Carr of Daly City. “Down the holes. Gophers smell a predator. Ask your hairdresser for some.”
Eleanor Najjar, who lives near Monterrey Blvd, prefers coffee grounds, “which is also good for the soil, and cod liver oil which has some effect.”
Kam Wong also goes the predator-stench route, though of a different variety: used kitty litter. Wong was told that the urine smell tells gophers that cats are in the area.
I’m skeptical. I’ve tried both coffee grounds and cod liver oil without success. I’ve also indirectly used the cat-pee method via my late, dearly departed cats, who peed all over the yard and stalked the perimeter but never caught or deterred a single gopher. Until he died last year at the ripe age of 20 (RIP), Marlow would idly watch gophers zip through the flower beds as though it was one of those YouTube channels for keeping your cat entertained while you’re at work.
Other cat owners have had similar frustrations. “I have a cat who clearly misrepresented herself on her CV. She is not a mouser. Her biggest prey thus far has been a horsefly,” said Elizabeth L., who lives in Miraloma Park. “I may be forced to pull up my front yard and do the gopher prevention process — some kind of fine mesh wire.”
That process can be grueling to do yourself — you have to dig everything up, rototill, place the mesh, lay down fresh earth — and costly to farm out, running from $3 to $6 a square foot, according to Genaro Lopez of Glscapes Inc., a landscaping company in Daly City.
“Gophers are my arch nemesis,” Lopez says. “They are my enemies.” Over 14 years as a landscaper, he has seen them lay waste to beautiful landscaping projects, destroy laws and gardens, and even sink paving-stone paths. Once, Lopez was working on a baseball field, and an exterminator was brought in to trap gophers. Within the hour, he had caught 43. He advises clients to take the extra step of adding mesh below their lawns and placing it around the root balls of plants.
Lopez warns that another common approach — drowning — can just lead the gophers to burrow deeper tunnels. I also know this from experience. The first year, I spent hours pumping water into the tunnels, only to be left with a massive water bill and lots of happy, well-hydrated gophers. Last year, during construction to replace a sewer pipe, we discovered two separate layers of gophers tunnels — one around 2 feet deep, the other nearly 10.
I’ve also tried gassing them with dry ice, which is just carbon dioxide in solid form. This was a tip from a friend in the Sunset, who explained that he and his daughters would buy dry ice, place chunks in the gopher holes, then cover it with dirt.
On the plus side, my kids thought this was the most fun activity ever. At first they were upset about the killing thing — my eldest, 9, is a vegetarian for ethical reasons — but the allure of the dry ice and the novelty of their mother actively encouraging them to wage war on the homefront won them over. Will they talk to their therapists about it later? If that’s all they have to be traumatized by, I’ll consider myself a very lucky parent.
But fun as it was, dry ice didn’t work — maybe because of that second layer of tunnels that gave the gophers an escape route. I tried caster oil pellets, to little effect, though Charles Day of Daly City told me they work well for him. “I start from the center of the yard, then go out to the edge a little at a time, and then soak the ground with water so that the pellets soak down into the soil where they travel,” he said.
Last year, I discovered TNT-looking smoke bombs that you light and insert into the tunnels, then run. They smell like sulfur, but they work pretty well. Unfortunately, they did not take out the entire population, who have shaken off their winter stupor and already begun munching their way through two flower beds.
I might try mothballs next, at the suggestion of Alan Wong, who lives in Parkside and has tried many methods. “I even caught two with pliers when they stuck their heads out the hole,” he explained.
That close-range combat is a little much for me. Another method I probably won’t try, if only because I don’t think I could pull it off safely: car exhaust. That’s what finally fixed the problem for Greg Gaar of Westwood Park. “I hooked up a hose to the exhaust pipe on my car and put it into the gopher hole,” he said. “Let it run for about five minutes, and that should exterminate them. They haven’t been back in years.”
But the best way to battle infestations is traps, according to Lopez and the experts at Sloat Garden Center. Unfortunately, traps can be gruesome. And hard to use. If you’re too squeamish to set them yourself, you can hire exterminators like Critter Control or Gopher Bros to do it for you.
But feeling up for the challenge, last year, I tried my own GopherHawk. It’s the one that Tom swears by when he’s not snipering them with his air rifle. He showed me how to set it and said he’d go by and check it every now and then. I must have set it wrong, though, because it caught a gopher but didn’t kill it. When Tom pulled the bloody, wriggling, half-alive creature from the ground, he was so upset he insisted that he’d place the traps himself from now on. But he does put the carcasses in my trash can, not his, which is fair enough.
If you do catch a gopher, here’s one last tip: Do not place the body in your green bin. They are not compost-appropriate organic matter, according to a representative from Recology. They should be bagged and placed in the black bin. Or, you know, left as a warning in your yard for the other gophers.