Pocket Gophers: Building soil, infuriating gardeners
Pocket Gophers: Building soil, infuriating gardeners
By: Jon Hammond
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Posted by editor Mon Oct 9, 2006 16:13:09 PDT
Viewed 788 times
0 responses 0 comments While most people are not fond of rodents in general, there is one species that home owners (especially gardeners) actively dislike: gophers.
These medium-sized, stocky rodents spend most of their lives underground, venturing out only to gather food or move to a new location. Their taste for roots, bulbs, corms and grasses puts them at odds with farmers, horticulturists and gardeners of all kinds.
Gophers are well-adapted to their life underground, with small eyes and small ear flaps, nearly bare short tails and fine, dense soft fur. Their eyesight is not the best (it is of little use in the darkened world of underground tunnels) but their sense of smell, hearing and ability to detect ground vibrations is excellent.
The Tehachapi area is home to a species known as Botta’s Pocket Gopher (Thomomys bottae) and they can be found virtually anywhere except areas with extremely sandy or rocky soils or in dense woods.
In the native lands, gophers are tremendous soil builders because they essentially rototill the ground as they excavate their burrows. Using their enlarged front feet for digging and their big incisor teeth for cutting roots, gophers scrape away loosened material and push it backwards behind them.
They then swivel around in place and push the newly-excavated dirt out of a lateral hole using their feet and chin. The soil that they push out is finely and uniformly tilled, like light brown coffee grounds. It resembles the loose, fluffy soil of a thoroughly cultivated seed bed and wild seeds do exploit the opportunities provided by a fresh gopher mound.
While hiking in areas of hard soil, you can encounter especially green or vigorous clumps of vegetation growing from the loosened ground of old gopher mounds.
Gopher are also the great underground home builders of our area. Especially in places with dense or compacted soil, gopher tunnels or portions of them persist for years after the original excavators are gone.
These tunnels or tunnel remnants are then used by a host of other animals, including snakes, ground squirrels, mice, toads, tarantulas, weasels, voles, etc. Sometimes these original tunnels are enlarged by successive owners, and in this way an old gopher burrow can be home to a ground squirrel, badger and fox as the hole grows larger.
Gophers, which are almost entirely solitary except when very young and still living with their mothers in her burrow, are food for many predators. Snakes and weasels hunt them in their tunnels, while coyotes and badgers dig them out and owls catch them when they venture outside their burrows at night. They are defiant and defensive, however, and gophers sometimes bluff larger animals into leaving them alone.
When I was a boy at our old farm on Cherry Lane, my Uncle Hank found a huge gopher snake with an enormous gopher that had partly eaten its way out of the snake’s belly.
The snake had apparently caught the large male gopher and swallowed it before it was dead, and the tenacious gopher was gnawing its way to freedom when both combatants expired.
I’ve kept a little pet gopher before and it was quite docile, allowing me to pick it up and taking baby carrots from my hand. The Nüwa (Kawaiisu) Indian word for gopher is Mu-yuts-si and that’s what I called my gopher before I released it — far away from any yards!
Gophers can do tremendous damage to cultivated plants, from riddling a lawn to killing 20-year-old trees. Traps and poison can both be effective at controlling them, but the best method is to start by excluding them whenever possible by using one-inch-mesh chicken wire.
Lay overlapping strips of chicken wire down before laying sod, and plant trees inside circular baskets made of chicken wire to block gophers. Lining the bottom of planters and raised beds with chicken wire before filling them with soil is also a good idea.
As maddening as their destructive tendencies can be, gophers really are important members of Tehachapi ecosystems whose burrows and tunneling benefit many other species. Now if you can just keep them out of your lawn or vegetable garden or tulip bed. . . .
Have a good week.
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