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A groundhog under your deck leaves a burrow entrance about ten to twelve inches wide, roughly the width of a dinner plate, usually tucked against the base of the house or below the bottom step, with a fan of loose dirt spilling out in front of it. You’ll also see chewed garden plants and flattened runways worn through the grass. Where tunnels have hollowed out the soil, concrete steps and patio slabs can start to sag or crack. Removal means setting humane live traps at the active openings, then sealing the space under the deck so nothing else moves in. September is the month to handle it, since groundhogs dig hardest right before they hibernate for winter.

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When Groundhog Removal Services Are Needed

The first thing most homeowners notice isn’t the animal. It’s the dirt: a mound of fresh soil piled against the lattice at the side of the deck, there one morning and bigger the next. By the time someone calls us about groundhog removal services, that hole has usually been open for a few weeks, and the tunnel behind it runs much farther than the pile out front suggests. September is when we hear about it most around Omaha, because a groundhog getting ready for winter digs with a purpose it didn’t have in July.

Woodchuck and whistlepig are the same animal, and every one of them wants a dry, protected spot with an easy way out the back. A deck sitting a foot off the ground over loose dirt is about as close to perfect as they’ll find in a subdivision.

How to Tell a Groundhog Is Under Your Deck

Plenty of things live under decks. What separates a groundhog from a rabbit is the scale of the excavation.

• A main entrance hole the width of a dinner plate, with a mound of excavated dirt fanning out below it
• Clipped, angled cuts on hostas and bean plants, taken low to the ground rather than nibbled raggedly
• If the deck boards have started to dip in one corner, the soil under them is going somewhere
• Look for claw marks and rubbed-smooth wood on the posts, since groundhogs climb better than their build suggests

Rabbits don’t excavate, and a skunk digging for grubs leaves shallow, cone-shaped pits rather than an entrance you could put your arm down. That mound of fresh dirt is what settles it.

Raccoons are the other common deck tenant around here, and they read differently: they leave the ground alone and go for the open space itself. If you’re hearing chittering under the boards at night instead of finding dirt in the morning, raccoon removal is the more likely job.

Damage Under a Deck Adds Up Fast

One burrow system runs fifteen to twenty-five feet and moves several hundred pounds of soil. Under a deck footing, the concrete pad a post sits on, that’s the part nobody sees until something shifts.

Homeowners call about the garden first, because that damage is visible from the kitchen window. The structural side is slower and costs more. Groundhogs put their winter chamber below the frost line, four to five feet down in eastern Nebraska, and they’ll route a tunnel past a deck post or along the base of the house without regard for what’s on top of it. We’ve pulled the lattice off a deck in Papillion and found the ground under two footings hollowed out.

• Deck posts and concrete steps settling unevenly as the soil beneath them gives way
• Expect chewed sprinkler lines and low-voltage landscape wiring inside the burrow run
• Vegetable beds stripped low, with beans and greens hit hardest
• Once a burrow is abandoned, skunks and rabbits move into the tunnel rather than digging their own

Why September Is the Month That Matters

Groundhogs are true hibernators. They don’t wake up on warm January afternoons the way raccoons do, so everything they need for winter has to be in place before the ground freezes.

Early fall is the heaviest stretch of digging all year. An animal that spent the summer in a shallow burrow will drive it deeper, add a second chamber, and put on close to forty percent of its body weight in six weeks. All of that work happens under your deck. Wait until late October, and the tunnel system is bigger, and the animal is harder to draw out. Wait until November, and it’s asleep down there until March.

Why DIY Trapping Usually Fails

Searching how to trap a groundhog turns up advice about cage traps and cantaloupe. The traps work fine. What goes wrong is everything around them.

Placement is most of the job. A trap set six feet from the hole catches nothing, and a trap set at the wrong hole catches nothing either, since most burrows have at least one back door dug from below and hidden under leaf litter or the panels closing off the deck. We find those secondary openings by reading the runways worn into the grass, not by guessing.

Most of what turns up when you search how to get rid of groundhogs falls into two camps: repellents that wash off in the first rain, and smoke bombs, a bad idea under a wooden deck. Groundhog pest control isn’t the same work as spraying for insects.

What Happens After the Animal Is Out

Relocation isn’t a drive to the country. Nebraska regulates where live-captured wildlife can be released, and dropping a groundhog on someone else’s land isn’t legal or fair to whoever owns it. We handle that end of it under state rules, so no homeowner is left standing over a full trap.

An empty burrow left open is its own problem. A ready-made tunnel gets claimed by something else within a season. The sealing work matters as much as the trapping.

What Our Groundhog Removal Services Involve

Every job starts with an inspection of the property before we quote a number. We’re looking for the main entrance and the escape holes feeding it, then how far the tunnel has already run under the deck.

From there, it’s humane live traps at the active openings, checked on a set schedule until the burrow is empty. Then comes the work that keeps it from repeating. We dig heavy wire mesh in along the deck perimeter and bend the bottom edge outward in an L shape, below ground level. A groundhog digging at the base of that barrier hits wire and quits. Plastic skirting stapled to the deck frame does nothing; they’re under it in an afternoon.

You’ll know the cost before we set a single trap. No trap check fees, no per animal fees, no trap reset fees. We’ll text you before each visit and tell you what we found before we leave. Dan Nielsen started this company in Treynor, Iowa in 2014 on the idea that a homeowner deserves a straight answer, and that’s still how we quote a burrow under a deck.

Get Ahead of the Fall Digging in Omaha

If there’s a fresh mound of dirt against your deck this week, this is the wrong month to wait. The digging accelerates from here, and a tunnel that runs four feet in early September can run twenty by the time the ground freezes. Call our Omaha office at (402) 300-8168 and we’ll come look at it, or read through our groundhog removal services page to see how the trapping and barrier work goes. We cover Omaha and the communities around it.

• Omaha, NE
• Lincoln, NE
• Gretna, NE
• Papillion, NE
• Bellevue, NE
• Ralston, NE
• Bennington, NE
• Valley, NE
• Waterloo, NE
• Blair, NE
• Chalco, NE
• Ashland, NE
• Fremont, NE
• Council Bluffs, IA
• Sarpy County, NE
• Douglas County, NE