Gophers!

Okay, the good news is that we don’t actually have moles in our front yard. The medium-to-bad news is that we have gophers. Or, rather, gopher (singular), we think. A new piece of home lawn care trivia: moles present as big mounds of dirt in your front yard. Gophers present as a gradual & widening area of dead grass and soft spots in your lawn. And moles are carnivores, looking for grubs & such, while gophers are vegetarians, only hoping to eat the roots of all the plant life that you love.

Somehow I’m comforted by the thought that it’s a gopher and not moles, and not just because I feel an affinity with Bill Murray now. Somehow moles seem incredibly alien & unknowable to me, while gophers seem more like your friendly mammal-next-door.

All the same, my favorite gopher is a dead gopher, at least in the vicinity of my front yard, so we’ve set a trap for the critter, so we’ll see how it goes. (Yes, I know that this is an incredibly unhip and unfriendly post to write on Blog Action Day, but it’s eating my yard, man. Gotta get this fixed. FWIW, our “mole guy” is a super-smart & friendly entomologist from UCSC who’s found that Silicon Valley types (and Woodside folks in particular) are happy to pay $55 per critter for removal.)