Gopher Wars Part Deux
For the last eight days I”ve been engaged in a huge battle with a the enormous colony of hateful gophers and voles that live on my little mountain, here in Escondido, CA.
It’s been a disastrous year for my gardening. Not only have I depleted virtually all the nutrients in my soil from gardening nearly year round for three years, but my gardening likely led to the introduction of the precise combination of protein and organic chemicals burrowing rodents need to propsper and become hyper fertile.
It’s maddening, especially when I’m sitting on my porch in the morning, quietly sucking down a cup of Vietnamese weasel coffee and see an apricot sapling twitching in down below.
That’s what really set me off. My response was to grab my scoped Beeman pellet rifle, load in a ballistic .177 pellet and hunker down behind my Hottentot Fig ice plant hedge and try to take head shots as they appeared in front of me. Four shots, three gophers.
Problem was: on the next morning there were seven new mounds in my lawn.
I Summon the Four Horsemen—The Great Gopher Apocalypse Cometh
Emboldened by my early success as a sniper, I escalated my attempts at gopher/vole extermination early last week; turning to my water supply. I would pump the burrows for 15 minutes and patiently wait for their soaking wet heads to appear at ground level, then I would fling them into the field where the lady hawk and her retinue of kestrel ladies in waiting live. That took care of another four gophers. But you see, these are spiteful animals and by now fresh burrows were appearing faster than I could get rid of this colonies’ slow learners.
(n.b. kestrels are a diminutive falcon species)
That’s when I began buying slabs of dry ice (CO2) at the local super market. After donning gloves and safety glasses I took a hammer to the dry ice slab, turning it into two-ounce chunks that I stuffed down the holes, which I then sealed with packed gopher dust. I’d load each hole with five or six nice dry ice chunks. Here’s how it works: the dry ice evaporates into CO2, which being heavier than air, settles in the bottom of the burrows. CO2 sublimates through the soil and permeates into sealed sleeping and food storage chambers. Overcome by the CO2, the burrowing rodents settle in for the big dirt nap.
This method eliminates the tedious task of disposing of headless limp gopher bodies left over from a day of sniping.
Also since all of my gardens have been cleared and burrowing rodents have destroyed my young stoned fruit saplings, I have exhausted two of the four apocalyptic horsemen I could visit on my gopher and vole colonies.
I was reluctant to let lose the third horsemen—fire—in the form of fuel air explosives (propane and an oxidant such as air or oxygen), piped into the their burrows. I’ve tried this once and managed to produce a two-foot deep hole and 20-foot long shallow trench in my garden that (four months after that memorable day) is only just now regrowing grass.
Moreover, it’s now the most dangerous part of the fire season here in Southern California, and the two untended five-acre fields on either side of my property are tinder dry yellow brown. I know enough about physics to understand a basic principle: What goes up must come down—particularly if it’s a fiery ball of screaming fur, that lands in one of those two fields after being blown out its den by an explosive propellant charge.
Three horsemen exhausted. One more to go. However, the number of new mounds appearing over night was down to a much more manageable number, say one or two.
That’s when the idea struck: “Why not use what Mother Nature provided to get rid of the hateful bastards?” So, how to enlist the big lady hawk that hangs around here and her flock of kestrel ladies in waiting.?”
So I decided that the way to get them actively hunting my gardens and small orchard was to convince them there was a ready supply of nutritious rodents close at hand.
So I went down to the local feed store, bought an open mesh rodent cage, and a mouse, which I promptly named “Judas”. Then I stopped by my favorite supermarket and got some yummy green stalked vegetables. I put the mouse in the cage, staked the cage into my hard packed clay soil about 12 inches from the entrance to the mounds, which I baited with the fresh vegetables. The first mouse lasted two days before the female Cooper’s hawk ripped the cage apart and carried Judas away. But in the meantime, the kestrels had nailed four voles. I bought a new mousy and a cage, staked it front of the freshly baited gopher mound and watched the kestrels and hawk begin their overhead patrols. By the end of the fourth day of this siege, the birds of prey had killed another five burrowing rodents, so I gave the mouse and its cage to a nine-year-old boy who lives in a house at the base of my mountain.
I haven’t had a fresh gopher mound appear in two days now.
Honest to God, I didn’t know that boy has a pet snake. — Jim Forbes on a brilliant rodent-free day here in rural San Diego County, connected wirelessly back to the world from a perch near my upper garden. Scoped Beeman .177 air rifle by my desk just in case I see a damn vole pop is head up.
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