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

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.

I am so excited the gophers are gone (for now). I know new ones will come but when that happens I'll be ready.Some history: I had pocket gophers destroying one of my garden beds, digging underneath and eating the roots of the plants from below, then emerging on the surface at night to eat the plants from the top, completely destroyed my plants. I tried other methods like smoke bombs and traps not wanting to use poison. But after the bed was completely decimated, I finally broke down and purchased this Yard Butler Gopher Bait Applicator and the Go Die gopher bait (https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B07L3MPCL1/ref=ppx_yo_dt_b_asin_title_o00_s00?ie=UTF8&psc=1) to make sure I do the job right.Using this applicator, I was able to poke around the mounds until I found the den. It was over 2 feet down and huge! I made sure I dispense plenty of the bait. Then I dug open several of the surface tunnels. If the gophers are alive, they will usually repair the damage the very next day. Well, it's been a week they are as I left them. There is no more gopher activity. I have even replanted the bed... and so far, so good. Additionally, I feel good about delivering the poisonous bait so deep in the ground that the bait pellets themselves and the dead poisoned gophers cannot be accidentally be eaten by other animals, or come to the surface when I put plants down.I have to say that this applicator in combination with the bait was SUPERBLY effective. This applicator seems like it will be around as long as me. And I have bait for years in case a new family of gophers decides to take up residence in my beds again. Looking back, I should have done this sooner. I might have been able to save some of the garden before it was destroyed.TLDR: I highly recommend this applicator and get some Go Die bait while you're at it. Sometimes you need to just spend some money to make sure you're getting effective tools for the job at hand!

I tried baiting manually by finding tunnels. So much work and the holes I dug where pretty large. So I tried this device and it is a miracle device. You load the bait (poison) and simply jab it into the ground. Once you find a tunnel you will know if you are hitting solid soil or the tunnel of the pests. This process shouldn't take very long. I had tons of tunnels so by my third stab in the ground I figured it out. Once you find a tunnel you simply crank the poison out. I suggest filling the hole right afterwards otherwise you might lose track. It was a pleasure to bait the entire backyard. It has been two weeks and so far I haven't seen signs of the voles.

Haven't used it yet, but is strong and will make setting bait much safer for my animals.

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.