Yard Butler Gopher Bait Applicator Eliminate Garden Rodents Dispense Gopher Mole Killer Poison Pellets In Tunnels IGBA-1

Dose what it was needed for

It arrived quickly and is very easy to use. I have had a big gopher problem in my yard and did not want to dig up my lawn and flower beds to set traps. We did not have any success with the Gopher Hawk and my yard was getting destroyed. You have to be patient and persistent in locating the tunnel and a good spot to apply the bait. For me it was a lot of trial and error but YouTube videos were helpful for this. I have used both Bonide gopher tox and Monterey Go Die gopher bait separately to treat different areas. The Monterey seems to be working better but is pricy for what you get.

Very strong, dependable, easily penetrates the ground, easy to tell when you've hit a burrow or nest. Takes a bit of time to learn where to poke to find the underground nests. Highly recommended.

Simple, effective. Services our 15 acres... so far so good.

This thing is built solidly. That having been said, it is difficult to use in areas that aren't soft soil. It really takes a lot of force to push this thing into the ground if the earth isn't moist or soft. Since gopher tunnels can be anywhere, and since you'll discover as many or more old, unused tunnels as recent ones, that means this will tire you out without much return for your effort. Moreover, you should know that the disclaimer that comes with it says that loaded bait pellets should be no larger than grains of wheat. That rules out a lot of the pellets I've used in the past. Fortunately, I bought this with some traps and a big bucket of Kaput-D, which appears to be poisoned grain. That fit perfectly and dispenses easily. Now, back to the old tunnels/recent tunnels issue. If you want to get maximum bang for your buck, you want to know approximately where to drive this thing into the ground and where to pump pellets into the tunnel. Of course there's no way to do that because there's no guarantee the entrances are near the dens ... unless you've got a small game hunting dog. I noticed after an hour of poking holes in the property and cranking the little pellet door open and closed that my russelschnitzel -- that would be a Dachshund/Jack Russel mix, more rudely known as a jackweenie -- really very badly wanted to help. I'd kept him locked up away from the effort just in case stray pellets dropped, but the little door is reliable, and if you turn the crank over into the locking notch, the door is closed and stays closed. So I let the dog follow me around the yard as I poked holes. Once I pulled the applicator out, he'd either sniff once, lose interest, and move on or start digging like mad. It was pretty clear that was his way of alerting on the new hole. So... if we started going in direction in which he wasn't interested, we went off in another direction. In the next hour we covered three times as much ground as I had alone, and I only bothered pumping pellets into the holes on which the dog alerted, and I pumped lots of pellets into those. Since the gophers prefer softer soil, having the dog provide guidance meant we skipped a lot of areas where the earth was likely hard, and were able to stick to areas that were mostly soft. End result: there are no repairs to all the tunnels I filled and smoothed in more than a week, and no new entrances at all. Since the nasty little burrowing tunnel rats almost always start repairing flooded or backfilled tunnels within a day, I am quite happily but cautiously optimistic.