We don’t have a lawn per se on Owl Acres. We have a yard. The difference I suppose is that we aren’t trying to create that lush green uniform and aesthetically pleasing golf-course monoculture. Instead, we are celebrating the diversity of creatures and plants that live in that space. To that end, Bryan set the mower higher recently to leave more room for the garter snakes. And now that we’re paying attention at a different level, what are those mounds of dirt dug up in the grass? Moles, we learned, leave volcano-shaped mounds as an entrance to their underground homes. This one is more crescent-shaped with a plugged hole in it. It’s about three inches across and forms a slight depression in the surface of the soil. It’s a gopher hole, made by a plains pocket gopher (Geomys bursarius). Several similar gopher mounds mark the passage of this little tunneler as she goes about her daily routines.
The adult female plains pocket gopher is nine to twelve inches long counting her tail. She weighs five to ten ounces and is covered in short brown to black, nondirectional fur. Her belly is lighter in color, and her feet are white with fringes of hairs on the toes to help with dirt handling. She sports a four-inch-long, nearly naked tail with sensitive hairs like the whiskers on her nose. She uses all of her whiskers to sense her world. For instance, she can run backward nearly as fast as forward using her tail whiskers to guide her.
She has a face only a mother could love. Imagine a short, rounded leathery nose surrounded by stiff whiskers. Her mouth is closed, but four orange rodent teeth hang outside her closed lips. Little eyes and small, rounded ears don’t give her much help in seeing or hearing, but she doesn’t care because she’s much more attuned to touch. That’s what she uses the whiskers for. Openings on either side of her mouth lead to cheek pouches which reach back across her thick neck to her shoulders. she uses these handy carryalls to transport food back to the storage pantry deep in her burrow. These pouches are fur-lined, and she can turn them completely inside out to empty and clean them.
With her mouth closed, she can use those big orange rodent teeth to help her dig without getting dirt in her mouth. What an amazing bit of engineering!
Furry brown critter with the large incisors of a rodent. She pops out of a hole in the ground and looks straight up at the camera. Plains pocket gopher Photo from Wikimedia.org by Leonardo Weiss
Speaking of engineering, she is a master at making tunnels. She does that primarily by digging with her powerful front feet. She uses the long, curved claws on those feet to dig into the dirt. If she hits something hard like a rock, she’ll go around it. If it’s a bit softer like a plant root, she’ll use her teeth and claws to go through it. As she goes, she uses her shorter back legs with their straight claws to push the excavated dirt behind her. When the pile of dirt behind her gets too deep, she turns around and pushes the dirt with her head, chest and feet back to the opening of the tunnel. There she’ll push it out onto the surface, creating a fan-shaped mound of dirt. She’ll plug the opening with more dirt and then go back to tunneling where she left off. Somehow she manages not to get dirt in her cheek pouches. Instead, as she goes along she encounters the roots and other underground parts of plants. She eats only plants, so she will eat some of what she encounters as she goes and store some in her cheek pouches to stock her pantry.
Our gopher spends her life digging. She will excavate up to 200 yards of tunnels, including shallow tunnels she uses for gathering food and tunnels below the frost line where she builds a pantry for storing food, a nursery for her babies, a sleeping room for herself, and a toilet room. She doesn’t hibernate in the winter, so she has to keep moving, digging, exploring to feed herself. She gets all the water she needs from the plants she eats, and she breathes the air in her tunnels.
The type of soil she needs to live in is dictated by a couple of factors. First, it must be porous enough for oxygen to move through it. Since her tunnels are closed to the surface, without that she would suffocate. Second, she needs soil she can dig through but which is able to hold the tunnels open and not collapse. Clay is too dense, and sand is too loose, so she needs something in between. Like the nice rich dirt in our yard. She prefers soil that is not too rocky for obvious reasons, and she isn’t overly fond of tree roots. Grassy plains and fields suit her very well—and lawns and golf courses. She especially likes alfalfa fields along with her native prairies. .
Generally speaking, people are not fond of plains pocket gophers. Their mounds mar the monochromatic glory of the perfect lawn. A long list of offenses includes dulling mowing equipment, girdling young trees, eating roots, tubers and bulbs, damaging underground utility cables and irrigation pipes, creating space for invasive plants, smothering grass, and damaging alfalfa crops.
They are, however, very good from an environmental point of view. They loosen and mix the soil, bringing tons of soil in a year’s time up to the surface. They fertilize the soil with their excrement and also move plant material deeper into the soil. Along with enriching the soil, gopher burrows provide homes for other inhabitants such as salamanders, toads and snakes.
Speaking of snakes, they are one of the gopher’s most worrisome predators. Snakes, as well as long-tail weasels, can go into the burrows to catch her. Badgers, foxes and coyotes will just dig up the burrow to get at her, and if she’s on the surface, which is extra-dangerous for her, she’s vulnerable to hawks and owls.
She lives a solitary life except during early spring when she mates, and when she’s raising her young.
We seem to have an influx of gophers this fall, or maybe we’re just now tuned in to seeing evidence of them. At any rate, they add a new dimension to the life on Owl Acres. We’ll let them be.
Feature photo by Author. Alt text: Small mounds of fresh dirt appear in the yard near the Owl Acres tree sculpture.