Explain your staging and funneling technique, please.
We had groundhogs nesting under our front steps and after a few thousand dollars of mudjacking we declared “war” on the critters. Tried everything. There were the two adults and 3 babies and they would eat my lettuce patch overnight. One year we had groundhogs burrowed under the porch on one side and a den of foxes on the other. The foxes were pretty easy to chase off; not so the groundhogs.
(And, we live in the middle of a good-sized town!!)
First, look for a drippy spiggot outside. I discovered one reason they liked being under the porch was they had easy access to fresh water all the time. So, I fixed the faucet.
After you’ve driven them from the hole, you have to understand the habits of the groundhog. When the family is raised the little guys leave home. Mom goes to her den to sleep and dad sleeps in his den. In the spring dad wakes up and goes and knocks on mom’s door to make sure she is still there, then goes back to sleep in his den. In a couple of weeks they wake up again and do the deed and then have the babies in “her” hidey hole (usually hers but if they really like his house better they pack up and move).
You have to keep fighting them even in fall. We finally got a bunch of giant smoke bombs over the 4th of July and saved them. In October when it started getting pretty cool we didn’t want either one of them to hibernate under the porch again, and by then the ammonia, pepper, urine, blood, kitty litter had all lost their charm. So, we dropped down a giant smoke bomb every few days.
You can tell if there’s a groundhog in the hole by the parasitic flies. The flies like to swarm the groundhogs face and when they go into their holes the flies will disembark and wait for him to come back out. They will loiter on the porch. So, if you see a bunch of flies just sitting and waiting, the groundhog is in.
Once we knew that the hole was empty and the groundhogs were sheltered elsewhere for the winter we filled up the holes and laid big, flat rocks over the opening. They have not come back this year.
I’m getting more smoke bombs this year to keep on hand.