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groundhog problem

#21
OP, the problem is that their diet is so varied. To get rid of pests without poison, violence or relocation, you have to diminish the food source. Groundhogs will eat grass if there's no other option so you're hosed in that regard.

Call your county office. As THEM what you can do, since they somehow see trapping and relocating as "cruel". :rollno:

Insert hippies in local government rant here.
 
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#23
carl-spackler-funny-caddy-shack.png
 
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#24
I had a ground hog problem earlier this year. I would watch him run the length of my pool to get from one neighbour's property to the next. Note I said "had"! He decided to take a run across the 4 lane highway near my home. I saw him splattered on the highway a couple of weeks ago. Car one, Ground Hog zero!
I also had a mole problem. My pool has been the ticket to dealing with them. I find them dead and either floating in the pool, or sucked into the skimmer. This usually happens when it rains at night. They can't smell the water in the pool and fall in.
My suggestion is to get a small plastic kids pool, dig it into the ground so the edge is level with grade. Fill it with water and wait and watch.
Fishheadjoe
 
#27
I've been led to believe that leaving them bubblegum to eat will kill them. It supposedly blocks up their works. We've resorted to this with the overabundance of chipmunks we seem to have developed in the past two years (still waiting for the predator cycle to catch up). They love eating our garden from below. It's rather annoying to think you have a crop of beets, for instance, only to find when harvesting that the bottoms have been chewed off. Or to pick a melon and find it's been eaten on the inside, leaving only a shell.
 
#31
rtslinger said:
Cheyenne pepper, chili pepper or red pepper. sprinkle in and around the hole and in your garden or they make a spray which has pepper in it but do not use the spray in the garden. good luck
Click to expand...

I like the way this poster thinks. Very intelligent, humane, and on-the-cheap! Some peppermint oil might also be added to that list IMHO. Please, just drive the critter away.. thank-you.
. .
 
#33
two fingers said:
OP, the problem is that their diet is so varied. To get rid of pests without poison, violence or relocation, you have to diminish the food source. Groundhogs will eat grass if there's no other option so you're hosed in that regard.

Call your county office. As THEM what you can do, since they somehow see trapping and relocating as "cruel". :rollno:

Insert hippies in local government rant here.
Click to expand...

... proving once again that you WERE on the set of Caddyshack.... pic from your "welcome home" post:
20170128_173127.jpg

Yep, too much time on my hands today.
 
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#34
two fingers said:
since they somehow see trapping and relocating as "cruel". :rollno:

Insert hippies in local government rant here.
Click to expand...
Nope. That one is called "don't let people that don't want to kill the nuisance relocate it to be someone else's nuisance." Probably with a healthy chunk of not encouraging idiots to get bitten handling animals they don't understand, but mostly, it's common courtesy for the folks that live wherever someone decides to dump the animal they are relocating - which usually dies anyway unless it makes it back to its home territory safely.
 
#35
T_Bone_TL said:
Nope. That one is called "don't let people that don't want to kill the nuisance relocate it to be someone else's nuisance." Probably with a healthy chunk of not encouraging idiots to get bitten handling animals they don't understand, but mostly, it's common courtesy for the folks that live wherever someone decides to dump the animal they are relocating - which usually dies anyway unless it makes it back to its home territory safely.
Click to expand...

I guess I can only speak to my area. All over my state there is state owned "Wildlife" land. Literally most people are within a few miles of one of those areas. You don't have to take trapped animals to someone else's house. I take trapped possums out to one near me all the time....if I haven't shot them first anyway.

The county I grew up in is the same way
But the area has become somewhat of a retirement area and the people who move in from up north have nothing better to do than to tell us dumb southern folk how to live.

So now my father is allowed to trap foxes and possums on his property because that is legal. He can even shoot them because that is legal. But he can't transport them to our farm a few miles outside of town because the people who moved in and took over think that's cruel. Gimme a break.
 
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#36
OP here, with an update.

First, thanks for all the suggestions. I seriously considered all of them, but then implemented none of them. And then.... the groundhog disappeared, despite my inaction. Problem "solved"!

When I started the thread I was seeing this groundhog pretty much every day, often for an hour or more in the morning and same in the late afternoon/early evening. But shortly thereafter, there was a day when it didn't show up, and then another, and then another.... Of course, I don't sit at my window watching 24/7, so for a few days I thought I might just not be checking at the right times, but now it's been a couple of weeks since either my wife or I has seen it. I don't know if a neighbor took it out, or it became roadkill somewhere, or it wandered off to another territory, but the problem just spontaneously disappeared.

So, I couldn't have hoped for a better outcome. The only problem is that the lesson I've learned is that if I just sit back and don't do anything, problems will go away on their own. I'm not sure that's gonna be reliably helpful down the road....
 
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#38
OP again. A number of people brought up the related problem of moles. Moles have been a big problem for me too over the last several years, peaking last summer when -- and I say this with no exaggeration -- there were large sections of my yard that literally were more mole tunnel than not-tunnel. It was so bad that it became difficult to walk on the yard, and almost impossible to mow. As with the groundhog, I had researched many potential solutions but in the end didn't actually do anything. And as with the groundhog, the problem just suddenly disappeared this year.

In this case, though, I have a hypothesis. Late last summer I started seeing a new snake in the yard: a norther racer that appeared to have taken up residence under my front porch. I've seen (considerably larger) rat snakes in the yard frequently over the years, but never a racer. Then, this spring, I saw not one but two racers sunning together near my front porch. (Methinks I'll be seeing lots of baby racers soon.) A little research confirmed that moles are very much on the racer's menu, and they seem to be the perfect size for the job.
 
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#39
I still haven't seen any groundhogs around my residence in the country. I have been being pestered by a family or raccoons, though. It seems the solution is to order a slingshot and ammo from Amazon. My cat's food and water bowls haven't been trashed lately...
 
#40
I had a critter problem. Moles and snakes. Even had a snake come up my dryer vent and was in the dryer when my wife went to do laundry. Oh, THAT was fun...I have dogs so poison was out of the question. Had someone tell me to spread old fashioned mothballs around my property at the change of every season. That was three years ago. No moles. No snakes.
 

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