TRAPLINE PRODUCTS BLOG



Trapline Products is a manufacturing business specializing in design and manufacture of high quality stainless steel specialty traps for gopher and mole control. Our manufacturing business is an offshoot of a gopher control service business we've operated on the San Francisco Peninsula since 1992.

As our service business grew over the years, we realized that the existing mole and gopher traps available on the market were not effective enough to meet the needs of our business. After many years trapping gophers and moles, we felt we had a pretty good understanding of the limitations of existing traps, and we were confident we could design traps that would get around these limitations and thus be much more effective and efficient.

The Gophinator gopher trap and the Trapline mole trap were developed between 2005 and 2007 and were awarded US patent number 7,380,368 in June, 2008.

More information on our business and the traps we manufacture for moles and gophers, including some free instructional videos on how to use our traps, is available at our main website at www.traplineproducts.com.
Our traps are available for purchase at our online store.

This blog will highlight interesting things that come up in the operation of our manufacturing and service businesses.

Thank you for visiting!

Thursday, July 30, 2009

Albino and Melanistic Pocket Gophers


After 17 years in the gopher control business, we had an interesting "first" today--actually two "firsts" on the same day and from the same jobsite in San Francisco. Pictured to the right are an albino pocket gopher, a melanistic(black) pocket gopher, and a normally colored gopher for comparison. While we see a lot of variation in coloration on the gophers we catch, we have never seen an albino, and we've never seen a melanistic gopher as jet black in color as this specimen.

About 2 weeks after we picked up the gophers above, we caught a second albino at the same job site. This time it was a large adult male. Clearly there is some interesting genetics going on at this particular location.