Gopher (AKA Round Tailed Ground Squirrel) Chronicles

By Nando

If sent elsewhere, do gophers, these members of this rapacious and encroaching species, get their RHE visas pulled? If predators are imported how does one export them back?

They are a highly mobile encroaching species, they encroach upward and downward and sideways, and are multiplying due to favorable conditions … monsoon and human provided nurturing … mesquite beans, mesquite bark, mesquite leaves, Texas rangers, prickly pear, garden plants, expensive landscape decor, and most anything green … except usually weeds.

… and someone must be feeding the coyotes, or are they also getting unemployment plus $600 a week?

… and do they burrow? Does a cat meow? It is no longer safe (or sage) to walk about the back forty … holes galore, and some more where one’s weight collapses a burrow to create another.

… a couple of weeks ago, a city main leaked for likely more than 36 hours … at a rate well above a fully open garden hose … a part of that stream had flowed during that time into a gopher hole… It did not fill up nor did it appear to exit anywhere. Do they dig cisterns? Saw some during the leak period; none looked freshly bathed.

There is some suspicion that they are displacing other burrowers or vegetation feeders … fewer rabbits? Squirrels? Tortoises? Lizards seem to be doing OK…

They are insouciant-like now, these Gophers, or whatever these little *** are. Are they beginning to seem proprietary rather than interlopers? Should we apologize, wallow in guilt if we do not grow green foodstuffs for them?

An observation as to their cerebral potency: In a gravel covered chain-link fenced square, an area accessible only to a ground squirrel/gopher, a newly dug burrow was noted. The gravel had been displaced very neatly and perfectly in a circle about 18 inches wide. The burrow opening was very neat and free of dirt accumulation. A few days later it was observed that the hole had disappeared, and the gravel was no longer displaced. In other words, the opening had been closed, and from without, the gravel had been meticulously replaced such that unless the hole had been sighted before, no hint of the underlying burrow could be detected, not even to the critical and wondering eye of the observer who had seen both. Truth 1.

Truth 2: At a square, cement floored structure composed of two brick walls forming an interior corner, and two picket-fence-like 36-inch walls completing an enclosed square, a dog of highly attuned predatory instincts and behavior was barking. It was its distinct “I smell a prey” yip and bark. Inquiry required removing the right-angled picket structure. Lo, in the corner formed by the bricks, a mound of dug up earth about 18 inches high was noted. It was very neatly piled and appeared almost fluffy. How did that much dirt come to be in the brick and cement corner? It appeared to just be a mound of piled up fluffy dirt … no openings anywhere. Upon removal of the wood structure, the dog thrust its nose toward the mound and let out a great bark of discovery, though nothing, hole or critter was visible. The mound was large, spreading out at least two feet. Seeking to perturb the situation, it was squirted with water from a nearby hose. Nothing. Bark, Bark, higher pitch. One more spray with the hose, and the dog lunged into the spray and snapped on a gopher/ground squirrel, simultaneously snatching it and killing it in one bite. So, there was a gopher in a mound of dirt in which no opening was discernible to dog or man. The dog is not for rent. Further reduction of the mound with the hose merely produced more mud.

So, truth one is of exquisitely disguising a burrow that had been/was there; truth two of a non-burrow which was nonetheless functional? Alfred Hitchcock and Twilight Zone come to mind … Gophers of the genus genius … only in RHE.

May 2020