I always like to think that God made everything for a purpose and I believe He did - even if I don’t understand why He created them. One of those thing is the pocket hole gopher, one of the best rodents for digging and turning the soil on the prairies. However, if you are trying to subdue your little piece of earth that the Lord has blessed you with, you’ll find they sure can make a mess of a hay field or garden. They will even dig up a road in their endless pursuit of grass roots and shoots.
In order to get a better understanding of the animal that we would be hunting I got a copy of “The Mammals of Canada” by A.W.F. Banfield. I highly recommend every home schooling family have a copy of this book in their library. From our research we learned that the rodent we were after was the Northern Pocket Gopher and it makes it home in most of the prairies of Canada and Northern US states. A.W.F. Banfield had a lot to say about this little dirt digging beast - he has four pages covering everything: he is 9 inches long and makes his nest as deep as nine feet to get below the frost line.
I found a very interesting thing about this little critter - they hold the record for the fastest growing incisor teeth, which as with most all other rodents are constantly growing. The pocket gopher sets the record at nearly 1 and half inches of growth per year. There don’t really do damage to the pastures or fields but it is the dirt piles they leave behind, and the fact that they can eat up to a ton of grass per acre if their population isn’t checked. The fact of the matter is we are raising cows not gophers and that ton of grass is a lot of beef and milk.
Our purpose is to control them, and in that attempt I will share with you how we trap the little beasts. We use a trap that is very humane and the gopher suffers very little. The traps are placed in pairs in the feeding tunnels, which are about 4 to 6 inches below the sod.
In this picture you can see the dirt mounds the gophers leave behind, they can push up several of these each night. First you need to find the dirt mounds the pocket gophers leave behind – look for the freshest mounds you can find. The fresher the mounds, the looser, finer and darker the soil will be. You will soon learn to tell which mounds are the freshest – the older mounds are harder and more compact, not as loose and fluffy as newer piles.
Now you need to take a small rod and poke around the mound or between the mounds until you find a tunnel. You’ll need to push down firmly into the sod to see if there is a tunnel underneath the top of the ground.
Here are the tools we use. A square nosed small edging shovel; it works very well for squaring up the hole in which we place the traps. As you can see the traps are rectangular and need a flat bottom to sit on. Next we have a small thin rod about 30 inches long or so with an ‘L’ bend at the top to help in the job of finding tunnels. We put a bright ribbon on the end so you can find the rod and traps – it help to spray paint the end of the rod a bright colour, sometimes the ribbon slides down or flies off, making the trap settings difficult to find.
With each pair of traps you will need a rod, and then you will need two traps per setting. I have tried using only one but you never know the direction the gopher will be coming down the tunnel. After much trial and error we have found that a trap pointing each way gets way more gophers. One thing you will learn is that if everything isn’t just right the gophers will pack your traps with dirt. They are clever little fellows.
Here I have found a tunnel and I’m cutting out a sod square right over the tunnel. (Thank you Kaelynn for taking the picture.)
Now we have the tunnel opened up and we are looking for a through tunnel, you can kind of see the tunnel in this photo. Some tunnels are dead ends – used only to deposit dirt on the surface of the ground. We are looking for a traveling tunnel that runs in two directions.
Once you have the tunnel dug out you make it fit your traps. The traps we use have a small hole in the back. The reason for this? Gophers like their tunnels to be well ventilated and can sense if air is moving though the tunnel. If no air is moving then they think it is a tunnel that leads to a dirt mound and they push dirt down those tunnels. So we want to have air moving though the traps so the gopher doesn’t fill the traps with dirt. To do this the trap maker has put an air hole in the back and you as the trapper are to set the trap so air flows though. I can never seem to get the traps spaced just right for sometimes the tunnel is curved or I have dug the trap hole too big. In this case I just put a small piece of sod over the back of the two traps to make a little air way between the back of each trap.
The next step is to carefully cover the traps with loose dirt. The goal is making sure no light is getting into the tunnel from your digging a hole though the roof of it. Here you see the dirt covering the traps and the rod in place to mark the trap setting. You’re all done setting!
When you go out in the morning, you’ll be looking for the rods that mark your trap settings. Oftentimes the soil on top of the trap setting will be distributed if the trap has been set-off and you’ve successfully caught a gopher. Be careful retrieving the traps – you don’t want to catch your fingers in one…ouch! Just keep your fingers away from the trap trigger in the middle of the open trap. Here you have a successfully trapped pocket gopher, this style of trap closes around their neck/chest.
Enjoy your trapping!
