Wednesday, July 22, 2020 The Nugget Newspaper, Sisters, Oregon
Looking at this from
Sue9s point of view, espe-
cially after all the work she
goes through keeping the
green going, I can under-
stand her annoyance when
something gets into her grass
4 like a pocket gopher.
Tales from a
It isn9t just the grass they
eat that gets Sue upset, it9s
also the huge mess they
make doing so.
by Jim Anderson
However, a soaring hawk
4 red-tail, Swanson9s, fer-
ruginous or the like 4 will
spot a gopher mound a mile
away (literally) and come
My wife, Sue, keeps a sailing along watching for
small lawn in the backyard the animal to come to the
of our residence at Sun surface.
Mountain. She believes a
One thing that brings a
lawn is a wonderful place gopher to the surface is the
for grandchildren to play. condition of their residence.
To keep it healthy, she irri- If the hole gets plugged the
gates, fertilizes and trims gopher has to open it quickly
it and becomes very upset to keep air circulating in
when one of Nature9s chil- their home.
dren decides to come and
Most times a hawk,
live in it.
owl or coyote will snatch a
One of the reasons I tol- gopher out of its hole when
erate lawns is they are mag- it comes to the surface, and
nificent places for dandeli- that9s that.
ons and worms to grow and
Be that as it may, those
for a variety of insects to lay mounds are particularly
eggs which hatch, eat the annoying to Sue, so when
grass roots and then meta- one appears she gets out her
morphose into food for other gopher traps and the poor
members of the biomass of things are soon food for
our back yard. Also, bees, Gary Landers9 raptors at his
and just about any pollinator rehab facility in Sisters.
you can think of, just love
It took two days, but her
dandelions.
recent efforts bore fruit when
she saw the trap
triggered in her
daily, early morn-
ing inspections of
her gardens and
lawn.
As she started
for the house to
show me the suc-
cess of her trap-
ping efforts I
could see the look
of consternation
on her face. It
didn9t change as
she said, <I caught
the 8gopher9 but I
PHOTO BY JIM ANDERSON
don9t think it is.
Sagebrush vole.
Look at this&,=
Sisters
Naturalist
Of moles and
voles
and she poked it under my
nose.
I took one look at the size
of the animal, color of the
fur, pointed nose, and said,
<You9re right that9s not a
gopher, it looks more like a
mole.=
And by golly, that9s what
it9s turned out to be. At first,
I thought it was a shrew
mole, but size, fur, length of
tail and larger-than-life front
feet didn9t fit, so I searched
through our old friend,
Wikipedia, and it turned it
into the broad-footed mole
pictured above; my first time
to ever see one. How about
you&?
And then there9s the our
native voles. Boy, can they
make a nuisance of them-
selves! In 1958, I had the
wonderful experience of
being in the community
of Alfalfa, east of Bend,
every Thursday evening
for pinochle and pie at the
Grover Place.
In those days there was
no such thing as irrigation
pivots for hay fields, it was
flood irrigation where water
was sent from canals then
to ditches out to do the job.
One Thursday evening, just
after dark, Johnny Grover
announced he had to go out
and <change the water,= and
have another piece of pie and
pinochle when he got back,
and I went along with him.
As we were walking
down the lateral between
the fields I kept feeling
something scrunch under
my feet and wondered what
in the world I was stepping
on. Johnny whipped out his
flashlight and shined it on the
surface and, lo-and-behold, I
was stepping on adult voles
scampering about.
When Johnny turned the
water into the field it was
astonishing to see a sea of fur
in the moonlight moving in
front of the water, uncount-
able numbers of voles trying
to stay dry.
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When they
baled the hay in
the dark of night,
the coyotes
would follow
the baler, gob-
bling up voles
hiding under the
ay.
windrow of hay.
he
Then, when the
coyotes were full
they9d puke up
ile
the voles in a pile
and go out for
m.
more of them.
The next day
ravens would
come by and pig
out on the piles
of voles.
PHOTO BY SUE ANDERSON
T h e m o s t My first look at the broad-footed mole, Scapanus
amazing thing latimanus. Perhaps yours as well.
was that those
same species of voles were and jackrabbits, the next
in such numbers in the year there wasn9t a vole to
Klamath country that they be found, which is what
had actually put a few cattle we9re seeing this year in
ranchers out of business. The the jackrabbits popula-
voles were eating the grass tions 4 and golden eagles
and other forage in such a r e s u ff e r i n g b e c a u s e
quantities there was nothing of it.
Ahhh, the nature of our
left for the cows.
As it is with boom- Earth, our home away from
bust-species, such as voles home. It9s so grand&
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