In 1996 I wrote about my personal struggles with a particularly wily and voracious strain of moles that had taken up residence in our yard. You may remember it, but probably not. But I am embarrassed to admit that some 28 years later, and despite numerous attempts to entice them to move on, the moles remain, as voracious and wily as ever. And now they seem to have gotten a little cocky.

In the past, the moles made their presence known by leaving neat little piles of dirt stacked randomly around the yard. Lately, those little piles have been getting steadily bigger. Now, some rise nearly a foot above the grass, looking like small-scale Egyptian pyramids. I can’t help but think of this new development as the moles’ way of rubbing my nose in their tenacious hold on my yard or ridiculing my inept attempts to expel them.

I know I could probably trap the moles and be done with them, but I don’t like the idea of trapping and killing any animal that is not of the rat or werewolf family. Over the years I’ve tried a number of non-lethal mole eradication techniques. A friend once sold me to spread high-grade fox dung around new mole hills—the theory being that moles hate foxes and, upon getting a whiff of fresh fox dung, they’d be high-tailing it to neighbor’s yard, and my mole problems would be over. (Actually, in the interest of mole anatomical accuracy, you’d have to say the moles would be “short-tailing” it out of my yard).

The fox dung system seemed to work…until I ran into supply chain problems with my dung distributor in Florida. I looked into substituting ferret droppings, figuring the moles would be equally afraid of ferrets, but that didn’t work as well, and evidently Ferret Dropping Collector seems to be a difficult position to find staffing for.

My father, who has since passed away, offered a novel solution. He suggested that I line the eaves of the roof on our house with wooden “bat boxes” to attract great hordes of bats to our property. The idea wasn’t that the bats would feed on the moles at night (as cool as that might have been), but that they would fly over our yard dropping random and explosive loads of fresh, pungent bat guano on the furry heads of the unsuspecting mole trespassers and cause such a panic that the terrified moles would flee en masse to my neighbors’ yards or else scurry across Lynwood Center Road and up into the woods around Gazzam Lake which, I am told, is pretty much ideal mole habitat.

I liked the idea, and the kids, who were just kids at the time, loved it and planned to take shifts each night looking out the windows to wake us all when the aerial bat bombardments began so we could all see the resulting mole stampede.

Alas, the idea was vetoed by the matriarch of the family out of what I still believe was an irrational and unfounded distaste of the idea of living in a house surrounded by roosts housing hundreds or thousands of flying, nocturnal, carnivorous mammals that look like flying rats.

About that same time, I read an article in either U.S. News and World Report or Sports Illustrated that noted that the average sperm count in U.S. men had dropped by nearly 50% over the preceding 50 years. The article suggested the drop may have been caused, or at least accelerated, by interference with the human hormone system due to our increasing exposure to toxic chemicals from pesticides, plastics and toiletries over that same period of time.

I wondered if the same phenomenon might be affecting the sperm count of suburban male moles. In an effort to accelerate the declining sperm count of male moles in our yard, I filled a number of empty plastic containers with Hai Karate and Brut cologne and placed them strategically near the opening of new molehills.

Again, that technique worked for a while, but over time its effectiveness declined—although at least new mole hills in the yard smelled better than they had previously.

Scientists have since speculated that the decline in American male sperm counts may be equally the result of men wearing tight briefs rather than boxer shorts, by standing too close to a microwave, or watching excessive amounts of reality television, and by “excessive” I mean “any.” I quickly ruled placing microwaves in the yard or projecting reality TV onto a large screen in the yard, or asking Wendy if she could sew together a couple of hundred pairs of boxer shorts in sizes that would fit adolescent and adult male moles.

I won’t say the moles have won, but yesterday I saw one pouring men’s cologne into the gas tank on my riding mower.

Tom Tyner of Bainbridge Island writes a weekly humor column for this newspaper.

Editor’s note: I questioned Tom about fox dung. We decided high quality comes from foxes on BI that have an organic diet, while low grade comes from Kent foxes that survive on Mountain Dew.