Got 'im

Bet you never expected to see me proudly displaying a dead varmint on this blog. I'll spare you the pictures, then. (They turned out rather blurry anyway.) Above you see the trap, sprung - there is indeed a dead pocket gopher in there. At the lower left you can see the carrot we placed for bait. It's one of our own carrots, and it probably would have been gopher food by tomorrow if we hadn't resorted to this small violence. The little white archway is a piece of a plastic yogourt tub, which had a previous incarnation as a cutworm collar but got cut in half for this gig. We were trying to simulate the original tunnel opening, and it looks like we were successful.

There were several surprises here.

For one thing, I didn't know pocket gophers were so big. I expected something mouse-sized, but the one we caught was more like a Richardson's ground squirrel in girth, though not so long in the body.

Secondly, I was amazed by its digging claws. The picture on the site I linked above doesn't do them justice. If we catch another one, I'll try to get a better picture.

Thirdly, I definitely hadn't expected to find a tunnel open to the surface. When we set out to place my new traps (acquired in Carlyle's amazing Home Hardware store this afternoon), we just assumed we would have to dig to find a tunnel. We started right in next to the mounds, sacrificing a few carrots in a row where several plants had already gone missing (pulled down from below). Not so easy. Apparently the gopher had plugged the tunnel there. Garth went to look for a rod to probe around the mounds, and I gazed around, wondering where to start. I noticed a very small pile of what looked like gopher-pushed dirt, away on the other side of the next bed, close to the edge of the lawn. When I took a closer look, I found an actual opening down into a gopher tunnel. I don't think I'd ever seen one before - not a pocket gopher tunnel. Ground squirrels make their front doors obvious, but pocket gophers will have mounds of pushed-up dirt dotting the landscape and not a single hole in sight.

We think maybe the lawn edging had something to do with it, forcing the pocket gopher to either surface or dig deeper.

And one more surprise: catching a pocket gopher so fast. I think we had it inside of an hour after the trap was set.

We reset the trap (or, to be precise, replaced it with a second trap while the first one gets rinsed and aired out). Here it is being buried.

It's a Victor "Black Box" gopher trap. They recommend setting two traps end to end, which is why I bought two, but in this instance we figured one would do. And it did.

I feel like I should make some witty remark, or say something apologetic. Yes, folks. Things die in my garden.