What is digging up my lawn at night?
Animals of all kinds, shapes, and sizes dig holes. Some of them live in these holes, others do so in their attempt to bury and hide food.
Some species dig holes for food.
To determine which animals are digging in your yard, you will have to identify the signs or the presence of certain species and varieties of animals.
These signs include the size and nature of the holes and their place in the garden.
Classification of animals that are excavators:
Animals digging tunnels:
These animals dig holes in gardens as access points to the tunnel networks they inhabit. Figurines and moles are the most common tunnel-digging animals.
Carvings dig holes with rounded mounds near the entrance, while those with moles are often difficult to identify, although they may have conical mounds around the entrance.
Small Burrowing Animals:
Small burrowing animals dig holes in the ground to create spaces to live underground. Burrows have one or two entrances depending on the nature of the animal.
The small animals that usually dig this type of hole are the squirrels, the ground squirrels, the shrews, the marmots, the muskrats, the prairie dogs, the Norwegian rat, and the kangaroo rat.
The regular presence of any of these animals in or around the garden indicates that they live nearby, not necessarily in your yard.
Most of these animals dig small holes, although muskrat and prairie dogs can form larger openings.
Big Burrowing Animals:
These animals show similar tendencies to the small ones, although some are more dangerous for human beings in relation to the squirrels or the shrews.
These animals include badgers, armadillos, foxes, coyotes and, in regions near water, river otters.
Most of them are probably not digging in your garden. Badgers often dig large holes and remove huge amounts of soil that they deposit in a sort of bib around the entrance to the den. Armadillos often create underground lairs in Florida and other southern regions.
The entrances to these lairs are long. Coyotes often use natural holes such as those found in and around tree roots and rarely create dens in highly inhabited areas. Foxes take over the dens of other animals.
Digging animals:
Raccoons and squirrels dig up plants. Animals that feed on insects and worms, such as armadillos, raccoons, and skunks, dig small cutlet holes in search of food.
The most obvious and common digging animal in gardens is the dog, and if your yard has a fence, the culprit for the holes is likely your dog, which may be chasing the mole-digging tunnels throughout the garden.
Stray and neighbor dogs dig holes anywhere, occasionally in your yard. Some domestic cats also dig holes, although much less frequently than dogs.
What Is digging up my lawn at night?
The mole:
It is one of the most interesting mammals in the animal kingdom, and that we all know that they are submerged in underground tunnels made by themselves without leaving almost never in their entire life, which is why they can be so difficult to locate and we have to resort to buying anti-moles products that help us locate them.
They are around 15 cm, that is, it is a small animal. They have very strong legs and claws, but really strong, imagine that they spend all day digging and digging without rest.
With dense dark hairs, round bodies and a pointed mouth. This is the mole, like a stuffed animal.
By not stopping to move and work they need to eat a lot, as much as the equivalent of their weight.
As they work they don’t stop to eat, if they see worms and worms on the way, they take them directly to their mouths. They also feed on newly hatched insects or rodents. In other words, these animals are carnivores.
The eyes are tiny and covered in skin; not needing this sense in underground life, it has developed more touch: the muzzle, face, limbs and tail are very sensitive to stimuli.
Those people who live in the field or are engaged in agriculture, consider the mole a pest that causes much damage to crops. Their voracious appetite does not leave earthworms, plants or roots in a fairly large territory.
To avoid their appearance or ‘scare them’, various techniques are used, ranging from the use of devices stuck in the ground that emit sounds and noises, to the placement of naphthalene and camphor in burrows.
Home methods to kill moles
1.Top Traps: You can use circular rodent traps, loop choking traps, or lure traps. For your purpose, you can even use mousetraps.
2. Use of anti-moles plants: there are plants known as “anti-moles” such as the imperial crown, daffodils, incarvillea or blackberry, which manage to keep them away.
3. Mole repellents: such as castor oil. Mix 1/3 of castor oil with 2 tablespoons of dish soap and 1/3 of water. You will need to spread the mixture around the garden.
Cayenne powder mixed with other products such as garlic, vegetable oil, soap and water, obtaining an interesting insecticide that, when placed in the garden, could not only scare away moles but also other animals.
4. Plastic Bottles: Place plastic bottles in the tunnels with activity. It is necessary that the bottles are open, that is, remove the cap. Why? When the wind blows and enters the neck of the wind, it will produce an echo-like sound and vibrations that greatly disturb moles.
Voles:
This species is clearly distinguishable from other small mammals, such as shrews, dormouse, or mice, due to its short and rounded snout, its reduced eyes and ears, its cylindrical body, its small limbs, and its short tail.
The coat, soft and dense, has a grayish-brownish coloration with yellowish shades on its back, while in the ventral region it shows a pale silver-gray.
It mainly feeds on seeds and fruits of trees, rhizomes, bulbs, tubers, and cereal grains, even consuming small invertebrates.
Due to its twilight and nocturnal activity, as well as its hypogeous life, it is one of our most difficult to observe rodents.
However, they are easy to detect, since the long underground corridors are deposited on the surface in the form of visible mounds.
The common vole remains active throughout the year.
Way to eliminate voles:
With plants: one of the best-known remedies to remove rodents from the garden is the plantation of spurge (euphorbia lathyris). Thanks to their toxic roots, moles and mice move away from the terraces and in our case they have become a really effective solution.
Solar repellants: This device is like a large nail, which has a solar insert on the top and sticks into the ground so that it vibrates approximately every 30 seconds.
Every time it vibrates, it emits a beep that is initially annoying, causing the voles to move away.
The Groundhog:
It is a genus of rodent Sciuromorphs of the Sciuridae family. Species closely related to squirrels, although they are greatly superior in size and are of terrestrial habits. Due to its physical characteristics it is well adapted to the cold.
Groundhogs live as a couple and their young. In burrows that they build themselves. They usually weigh 8kg, measure 55cm long, and 18cm high and live for around 15 years. They feed on herbs, wild berries, and roots, making them herbivores.
These animals are very sociable, using a wide variety of sounds to communicate with each other, especially when trying to warn of danger.
Their main enemies are birds such as the crow, the owl or the golden eagle. They store food and hibernate in their burrows during winter, which is approximately 7 months.
Natural repellents to avoid marmots.
You can use liquid repellents, which can be applied to plants that groundhogs eat or to different surfaces that groundhogs inevitably touch (eg grass, shrubs, hedges, trees, piles of firewood, etc.).
You can also use granular repellents, which can be spread across the ground to create barriers around certain areas (for example, flower beds, orchards, trees, pathways, buildings, even groundhog burrows, etc.).
Skunk:
It is a medium-sized mammal whose fur is black with stripes or white bands of various sizes.
This animal lives in burrows built by himself, and that is up to three meters deep and is divided into rooms or chambers.
It uses its clawed front legs as shovels and can also occupy nests or caves vacated by other species.
The skunk is omnivorous and feeds mainly on insects, fruits, eggs, small mammals, honey, and birds.
Males are very solitary and almost do not meet other congeners, since their territory may be somewhat limited.
They only cross these boundaries when in late winter or early spring they search for a female to mate with.
The skunk’s main ‘skill’ is the strong, fetid odor released from its anal glands, which it releases by raising its tail or hind legs after producing a shrill, high-pitched sound.
This substance can reach two meters away and is the main defense weapon it has.
Tips to prevent skunks from entering your yard:
Pepper spray also repels skunks and other wild animals, such as squirrels.
Citrus peels naturally repel skunks. Spread either lemon or orange peel on your patio especially in areas where skunks are suspected to spend time.
Ammonia; Soak the cotton balls in ammonia and place them on your patio to keep skunks away.
Moth balls.
Install motion activated sprinklers.
Use chemicals that repel skunks.
Caution:
If you use ammonia or mothballs, keep them away from children.
Mapache:
Vulgarly known as raccoons or scrub bears, native to North America. They belong to the genus Procyon, carnivorous mammals of the Procyonidae family.
They are small, slightly older, and thicker than a cat, with medium-long, silver-gray hair, darker in the center of the back, almost white-tipped hair, long, ringed tail (silver-gray to white or almost white).
A characteristic is the black hair stain that goes from each cheek to each eye, which is almost exclusive to this genre and makes it very recognizable, as it seems as if they were wearing a mask.
It is a forest animal, especially near rivers, although it has also learned to live in inhabited areas. In its natural habitat, it eats everything from frogs to fruits, but in cities and suburbs, it uses garbage bins to eat the remains of food thrown into them.
They eat the eggs and chicks of birds and also the eggs of crocodiles and other reptiles.
Raccoon repellent recipe
This recipe is recommended by the Larimer Humane Society of Northern Colorado to protect plants from raccoons trying to feed on them.
Mix all the ingredients and spray the repellent on your bushes, plants, trees, around and inside the trash cans, and anywhere you want to keep the raccoon away.
Mix a small bottle of hot sauce (such as Tabasco) or a can of cayenne pepper with a gallon of water with a teaspoon of mild detergent added.
The detergent will help spicy water adhere to plants and everywhere you spray. Make sure to wash thoroughly before eating any fruit or vegetable you harvest that has been sprayed previously.