If you aren't familiar with the movie, Carl wages war on the gophers that are digging up the golf course. It's one of the subplots in a basically plotless movie.
Crossed Sabers has been overrun with pocket gophers. Every morning I wake up to fresh dirt mounds from their nocturnal excavations. All that loose dirt in the photo below, which is in a line about 5 feet across and fifty feet long, is from their digging.
And this is just one small section of the damage across our entire property.
Even worse, in my opinion, is what they are doing to the paddocks. These piles of dirt are from their digging. The tunnels are about 4 to 6 inches below the surface.
As I was walking through the paddock, my foot sunk into the ground. I did just a bit of digging and uncovered this....
...it's one of their tunnels and it's about a foot deep. A horse could easily break a leg by stepping into something like this. The gophers have to go.
To quote Carl Spackler from "Caddyshack", "License to kill gophers by the government of the United Nations. Man, free to kill gophers at will. To kill, you must know your enemy, and in this case my enemy is a varmint. And a varmint will never quit - ever. They're like the Viet Cong - Varmint Cong. So you have to fall back on superior intelligence and superior firepower. And that's all she wrote."
All jokes and fun aside, gophers are a huge problem here and they will eat everything I plant...the perennial garden, vegetable garden, orchard...the world is their salad bar.
I don't want to use poisons, since it's too easy for a neighbor's cat or dog to get ahold of a poison-laden gopher carcass. Not to mention how easy it would be for a coyote, owl or hawk to do the same. Gopher repellants are only marginally effective.
Enter Trapper John and his intrepid canine partner Cayenne.
Trapper John spent two days with me teaching how to trap gophers. We are not live-trapping the critters. If you are squemish or tender-hearted, I suggest you stop reading now.
My property is infested with Northern Pocket Gophers. They are digging machines. They live to dig and to eat plant roots. It's nothing for a pocket gopher to dig a 600 foot tunnel. Their front claws are perfectly designed for this task.
The first day that Trapper John was here, he taught me how to "read" what the mounds of dirt are saying about gopher activity. We used that information to set 32 traps. We caught two gophers within hours of setting the traps. That night we caught three more and last night I caught one.
These traps kill very quickly and cleanly by crushing the gopher's chest and breaking their spine.
There's not much you can do with a dead gopher besides toss it out for the coyotes and ravens. I'd given some thought to taking up taxidermy so I could stuff the gophers and use them in quirky displays to sell at the flea market. You know...a gopher in Munch's "The Scream", da Vinci's "Last Supper" or Gophers Playing Poker. But ahh well, they're better put to use as coyote food.
No comments:
Post a Comment