Thursday, October 27, 2011

Garden Chipmunk Finally Caught

Please visit and like my new facebook page Georgia Home Garden.

Warning, this post is about how I finally caught the chipmunk terrorizing my garden. It contains pretty graphic information and may be unsettling to some people. If this is you then do not read any further.

I have been trying to catch this chipmunk for a few weeks now and nothing has worked. I have tried rat traps, glue traps, metal cage traps, you name it. I see him all the time but he always runs into my lima bean patch and disappears.

Tonight I figured out that he was been running into the open end of a drainage pipe that I have installed in my garden. My garden area is outlined in concrete pavers and this obstructs the natural flow of water out of my yard. I built a redneck drainage system to funnel the water that build ups in front of the pavers. It consists of a simple cone drainage grate that is connected to a piece of black pipe that runs under the pavers and out of the other end.  The other end of the pipe is exposed where the water drains out.

Once I figured out he was in the pipe, getting rid of him was easy.  First I stuffed the open end of the pipe with a towel, essentially trapping him in the pipe since the other end of the pipe is the drainage grate.  I then put my water hose over the grate and began to fill the pipe slowly with water.  I wanted to be as humane as possible, so I had my pellet gun ready for when he tried to escape the water once it filled the pipe.  He finally appeared at the top of the grate and I did what I had to.

I am glad he is finally gone.  I may put another grate on the open end of the pipe just to prevent any more chipmunks from getting the same idea.

This is the hav-a-hart trap that he just was too smart to go in.

This is the grate in front of the pavers

This is the open end of pipe on the other side of the pavers, nice lima beans.

You can see the distance from the grate to end of pipe, nice little spot for him to chill underground.

3 comments:

Gingerbreadshouse7 said...

Good job :o).. to bad he wasn't as smart as you :o)

Farm Girl said...

Thank you for becoming my newest follower. Your garden is lovely. When we first moved here we must have had hundreds and hundreds of ground squirrels. We knew we couldn't even begin to put in a garden or even fruit trees because they are such pests. My husband made bait traps out of plastic PVC pipe and they would crawl in and eat the bait. I am glad you finally got the little thief.
Your garden provided lots of food this year.
We are still growing egg plant and peppers, until the frost.
It is nice meeting a fellow gardener.

Kris said...

Ginny - Thanks, yeah I finally won, but he was smarter than me for a few weeks there.

Farm Girl - Thanks for following my blog as well. Your blog layout is very clean and organized. We have a lot of squirrels around here too, but so far they have left me alone. I look forward to following your blog.