ZP Rodent Bait Reviews

13 of 13 people found this review helpful:

Works well on gophers and voles in mountain yard.

By Ernie in Westminster, CO on 09/06/2010

Been using this product for about 3 weeks on pocket gophers and voles in vacation home mountain yard and it has dramatically reduced the visible activity. (10-15 active gopher mounds to less than 5 af…

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Been using this product for about 3 weeks on pocket gophers and voles in vacation home mountain yard and it has dramatically reduced the visible activity. (10-15 active gopher mounds to less than 5 after just 3-4 applications!) For pocket gophers, it is best to cover the holes once the bait has been placed as near the "tee" in the runway -- otherwise the gophers seem to push the bait out with the soil they use to plug the hole. Even using this technique, a couple of the more pesky gophers still tend to push the bait out, and it is taking a couple of tries before they eventually disappear. I use 2-3 "spoonfuls" for each gopher mound that I am able to find the opening. For the voles, I find their runways near my trees (usually where I have recently watered) and just put a spoonful or two in their openings. For these, I am not covering, but I will experiment more to develop my technique. The only reason I didn't give this product 5 stars is because the bait pellets turn to mush if the soil is too wet and the pellets absorb moisture from the wet soil. I doubt the gophers would be able to put the mushy pellets in their cheeks. About 45 yrs ago as a kid growing up on a ranch, my dad had me trap gophers for 10 cents each in our large irrigated fields. Using only 10-12 traps, I would frequently collect $3-4/week, so I learned a lot about how these little creatures work. When trapping them, you always leave the hole open so they will come to investigate, but when poisoning them you cover the hole or they will push all the foreign material out when they plug the opening themselves. Then in the Fall when school started, I would get paid to just poison them as I didn't have time to "run my traps." Back then we used treated oats/wheat as the bait (with God only knows what poison). The grain seemed to work well although it might be weeks before they eventually ate the grain that they probably stored in their underground storehouse. The reason I didn't go with that type of poison again is because we have a dog who likes to hunt gophers and I didn't want some secondary effect of the poison to bother him should he find a poisoned gopher. As this product creates phosphate gas, it seemed safer than other products I considered.