Mole and Gopher traps blog

Trapping "Gophers" in Africa

by Steve Albano on 05/28/21

Sometime back I got an email inquiry from a very enterprising farmer in Kenya by the name of Simon Kinjanjui, asking if our Gophinator trap would work for "gophers" in Kenya. Well there are no gohers in Kenya or anywhere outside of North America, but there is a similar animal known as the East African Molerat (aka Tachyoryctes splendens) which lives in undergroud tunnels like gophers do, does the same type of damage to agricultural crops as gophers do, and also looks almost exactly like a gopher. We had sold traps previously for use on a molerats to mamalogists in Russia and Romania, to chickory farmers in South Africa, and to a golf course builder outside of Windhoek, Namibia. I told Simon that not only did I think our traps would work if we got the trap size right for the size of the animal, but also that I would be happy to come over to Kenya and test out our traps with him.

I met up with Simon at the farm of Mrs. Joyce in Kiambu County on the outskirts of Nairobi. Joyce grows a variety of vegetable crops and those suffering the most from molerat damage were sweet potatos, Napier grass(a forage crop for animals), and banana trees. Here are some pictures molerat damage to these crops:

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Color Sports in Moles and Gophers

by Steve Albano on 07/25/13

Color sports are generally rare in the animal kingdom, but somewhat less rare among burrowing mammals. We've come across a a couple of melanistic(black) gophers, several all white albino gophers, and a few "blond" moles. They are very rare, and even doing mole and gopher control full time professionally and trapping many thousands of animals per year, we normally only run across these special individuals once every few years, although as pictured below, on one job we caught an albino and a melanistic gopher on the same day within yards of each other.

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Mole Damage on the dikes in Holland

by Steve Albano on 02/13/11

These pictures were sent in by professional trapper Ger Visser from Holland. Of course holes in dikes are not a good thing, and moles apparently make a lot of them on the dikes in Holland.

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