Jeff Roberts kneels down onto a sea of ants and readies himself. His protective gloves are stiff and smell of death. The ground is eerily quiet. The box trap lies half-wedged into the soil like a casket that’s been dug up. Many times he’s been bitten. He slowly pulls out the trap, exhales and flips it over, his Fu Manchu moustache rising to reveal a smile. Rotting flesh is a welcome sign.
“My trap, they sneeze and it goes off,” says Roberts.
The 44-year-old Redondo Beach trapper and owner of Specific Products, winds his green truck through the streets of Redondo Beach. He stops when he recognizes a friend and peeks his head out the window.
“Gopher!” his buddy yells. “You going up the hill?” His buddy points to his bike. They arrange to meet later.
Roberts has one hand on the wheel and one hand flapping out the window. Resembling an honorary grand marshal, he beeps his horn twice and waves to workers on the side of the road, his voice booming a hello across the winding roads of Palos Verdes.
PV is his backyard – 99 percent of his business is here.
In the hills his worn boots crush the vegetation beneath him — twigs snap, leaves scatter — a beaten rocky path acts as a compass. Roberts rolls up his khaki colored shirt with a picture of a gopher in a red circle with a line drawn through it.
He spots the fluorescent orange flag sitting a foot off the ground. Life surrounds it: a squirrel skips beneath a hovering raven- a peacock screeches nearby.
With an instrument that resembles a barbeque skewer, Roberts pokes around the trap.
Death is never a certainty.
With two hands, as if he’s about to help deliver a baby, Roberts pulls out the trap from the cold ground.
The box trap is a baitless trap that is designed to attract the gopher by “opening the door.” This door is the air vent created by the trap, allowing air to flow between the burrow and above ground. The gopher senses this airflow and wants to close it because it gives an opportunity for predators to enter the open hole, find the gopher and kill it. When the gopher uses it’s front legs and long teeth to push the dirt out of their tunnels and onto the grass above, it springs the trap and gets caught.
Jutting out from the rear of the trap, the hamster-like hair is rigid and damp. The thick tail lies limp.
The dead animal makes a thud in his bucket, its carcass eventually transferred to his freezer at home. Roberts works with a non-profit group that uses his frozen gophers to rehabilitate birds of prey that feed off of rodents.
Next stop, Palos Verdes resident, Michele Berstein.
Roberts prepares his traps by scraping the rust off the spring and metal bar, a ritual of sorts that serves to eliminate friction.
Like a crime scene investigator, his head scans the front yard. As dogs bark relentlessly, he pulls down his signature hat and bends the brim, undeterred. No evidence.
The backyard has dense trees along the back wall. A couple of palm trees dot their way through the patchy grass. It looks as if a hack golfer had come to practice long drives without a tee. Still, no evidence.
Roberts walks to the other side of the house. Activity. He points to a mud nest that may be housing swallows on her property.
Money isn’t exchanged, checks aren’t written. This day, a potential client turns into a non-client.
“He’s incredible. He’s honorable,” says Berstein. “He’s really like a legend. It’s kind of cool.”
Off again. This time to a sprawling residence: two traps, two dead gophers. Roberts whips out one of his business cards and scrawls the day’s catch on the back of it, wedging it into the front door.
He has studied the science of capturing gophers, and every year he finds he gets a little closer to figuring out that little thing that nobody knows of.
“The second you think that you got it, you don’t, and that’s true with anything in life,” says Roberts. “The smartest people in the world will be the first ones to tell you they don’t know it all.”
Part mountain man, part philosopher, Roberts is all too familiar with the stories of landscape destruction and chewed through PVC waterlines and sprinkler systems. He’s seen firsthand the disruption of the integrity of patios. Eradication is not a goal, controlling a problem is.
His story begins with his family’s own troubles.
Growing up in the verdant backyards of PV, Roberts earned his allowance from catching gophers and preventing them from destroying his dad’s coveted garden. At the behest of his father, Roberts then helped out a neighbor.
Recognizing a summer job opportunity during a break from middle school, Roberts went to work creating flyers to advertise his newfound service. He purchased a stencil set from Aaron Brothers and made 400 little flyers. His business line was his parents’ home phone number; he figured they couldn’t say no if he didn’t ask them.
“I got two phone calls that night and that’s how this little business started.”
As the years passed, Roberts continued to run his small operation, using his earnings as “freedom” money, not thinking that this would possibly be his career.
Roberts dabbled in school and other business ventures, but throughout the years he never strayed too far from his box traps.
You can take the boy away from the gopher, but you can’t take the gopher away from the boy.
After deciding that his love for gopher trapping could translate into a lucrative career, Roberts began building his business and establishing himself as the premier expert on gophers up and down the coast. He landed clients in Laguna Niguel and Mission Viejo to the south, with Malibu and Ventura County to the north. He found himself driving long distances to catch gophers, but the drives always led him back to the South Bay.
On the road, Roberts points out what seems to be every home in PV — all clients.
If he misses one client’s gopher, there’s another client down the road to absorb the loss. The typical success rate during a normal time of year for Roberts is typically 70% on the first setting — through resetting and relocating, it’s virtually 100%.
He pulls over to a close friend’s house. The garage is open and in trademark “gopher” fashion, he belts out his friend’s name. On the workbench in black marker is a question that asks the whereabouts of “gopher.” He disappeared for a little while after doing the electrical work when his friend moved in; returning the favor, his friend allowed him to use the workbench to build traps.
His tightly knit group of friends are very familiar with his lessons on gopher trapping.
Lesson One: the systematic approach.
It’s three steps. Step One is determining for a client if the problem is gopher related. Some animals, namely skunks and raccoons, give a false sense that there are gophers in the area, especially PV. If Roberts determines that yes, gophers are present, he begins to set the necessary traps. When a gopher’s caught, Step Two begins. He analyzes what’s in the trap; is it male, is it female, an adult, are there others? The majority of the job goes from the first step to the second step and back. When he doesn’t see any evidence of others, it’s on to Step Three to ensure there are no more gophers on site.
When Roberts can be certain there aren’t any other gophers on site he can move on to the next job.
Lesson Two: follow the secrets of successful trapping.
The first is experience. Roberts has almost thirty years now in the business. The second are the box traps; the box traps he uses no homeowner can purchase at the store. He manufactures his own box traps because what’s available in the store is simply not good enough, he says. His self-made box traps are made out of 2 by 4’s, with both strong springs and sensitive trigger tabs, and have been mechanically redesigned to kill the gopher quicker and more humanely.
If the trap’s been triggered, many times the air vent is still open. If there’s a second gopher in there, that gopher senses the airflow and backfills behind the deceased gopher. If the trapper pulls up a trap with a deceased gopher and it’s plugged up, there’s another gopher in the area and another trap is set.
The third factor of success is patience, and that’s where the clients come aboard. If they’re willing to give Roberts the time, success is imminent.
Lesson Three: a thinking man’s game.
The final set of threes is the thinking that when Roberts sets the traps, one of three things will always happen. The trapper will either catch the gopher, miss the gopher — physically it’s gone to the trap but you haven’t caught it — or it’s gone.
A good trapper can evaluate many factors when conducting business: they can look at mound patterns; they can factor in the time of year, as gophers are temperature-sensitive creatures and trappers can predict the gopher’s seasonal activities; they can determine if it’s breeding season to gauge if the gopher will be seeking out others.
“It’s turned into a study where certain times of the year I’ll actually have them in little habitats to study and learn from them,” says Roberts. He went so far as to try to breed them “because I wanted to see their growth rates, to see their behaviors.”
The day is done. His buckets are nestled tightly in the truck’s bed. Death follows Roberts as he winds his way down the hill, with one hand on the wheel and one hand ready to wave.
If you have any questions regarding possible gopher-related activity, Jeff “Gopher” Roberts can be reached at 562-866-0731.
