Report of Missouri Farmers* Week. 557 



THE POCKET GOPHER. 



In Northwestern Missouri the pocket gopher is especially 

 abundant, while in some sections of the State it is entirely absent. 

 It is especially annoying in hayfields, where the piles of earth 

 thrown, up seriously interfere with the mowing machinery. They 

 also do serious injury in the orchard by cutting off the roots of 

 trees, and sometimes a good many trees are killed in this manner. 

 They may be easily trapped by setting a steel trap in the forks of 

 their runways, or by dropping poisoned potatoes into the hole. I 

 have found that, in addition to the red-tailed hawks before men- 

 tioned, weasels and the little spotted skunks, commonly called 

 civets, are very destructive to these animals. In Iowa the bounty 

 system has been in force for some time. Although I have noticed 

 accounts of as high as three hundred dollars being paid out by a 

 single county in ten days, the bounty does not seem to be an 

 effective method of ridding the country of gophers. Where they 

 become so abundant as to make it necessary, the landowner will 

 begin a campaign that will be effective for a short time and then 

 relax his vigilance. From careful consideration of the subject, I 

 have reached the conclusion that a permanent bounty is a useless 

 drain on the public treasury. It may be advisable to offer a liberal 

 bounty for a short period of time, but when a permanent bounty is 

 in effect, the rate is always so low that few find it profitable to 

 hunt or trap the animals for the bounty alone. Those who will 

 kill them anyway, get a little easy money from the public treasury 

 without rendering any equivalent. In the case of the gopher, the 

 encouragement of their natural enemies will be much more effective, 

 and the poultry destroyed by the hawks, skunks and weasels all 

 put together will not amount to anywhere near the amount now 

 paid out in bounties. 



Bull snakes are also said to be effective destroyers of both 

 pocket gophers and field mice. 



FIELD MICE OR MOLES. 



The bobtailed field mice or meadow mice are a source of serious 

 injury to the orchardist, David E. Lantz, in a bulletin issued by 

 the United States Department of Agriculture, makes the state- 

 ment that the aggregate loss to the farmers of this country from 

 this source averages not less than three million dollars annually, 

 and in some seasons is much greater. In parts of the Old World 

 they have become so abundant as to seriously cripple the agricul- 



