The Pocket Gopher. 127 



row. They do not often kill more than from six to ten in one spot."- 

 A. L. BROOKE, Topeka. 



"The pocket gopher is not a great pest with us, yet does considerable 

 damage. He does not seem to be particular as to what he destroys. The 

 past season he has crossed a block of two-year-old cherry-trees, taking 

 one to three trees in a row and crossing over half the block. In one 

 place he has cut off probably fifty pear trees (Kieffer), and in still an- 

 other place a half dozen poplars, ten feet high, an inch in diameter. We 

 like to follow with trees where alfalfa has been plowed up, but it is nearly 

 impossible to do so on account of pocket gophers. They seem to congre- 

 gate in the alfalfa, and it takes a year or two to get the land free from 

 them." F. W. WATSON, Topeka. 



Potatoes. Potatoes and sweet potatoes sometimes suffer 

 seriously from the depredations of gophers, but^of course the 

 animals do not gain a permanent foothold in potato fields as 

 they do in the tracts of ground remaining uncultivated for a 

 period of years. They generally invade the potato ground 

 from the surrounding fence-rows or from adjoining meadows 

 or alfalfa fields. If no effort is made to destroy them, they 

 will often establish themselves for a time in any part of the 

 cultivated field. Here they eat the pieces of potato that are 

 planted in the spring or bite off the roots of the young sweet 

 potato plants. Later they feed upon the newly forming roots 

 or tubers, causing the death of the plant. In the fall they pro- 

 ceed to harvest their share of the crop and store it in their un- 

 derground root-cellars for winter use. Not content with what 

 they may harvest on their own account, they find their way 

 into the farmer's potato-pit and steal at their leisure. It is 

 surprising to note the heaps of potatoes, sweet potatoes and 

 apples sometimes carried away thus from pits and cellars and 

 stored in chambers in the gopher's runways. In making in- 

 quiries of potato growers along the Kansas valley I have 

 learned of several instances where the thefts amounted to five 

 or six bushels. Prof. L. L. Dyche, writing to the Department 

 of Agriculture, reports a case near Lawrence in which thirty- 

 five bushels of sweet potatoes were taken from a cellar dug in 

 rather sandy ground. To make room for their stolen treasures 

 the rodents carry all the excavated earth into the potato cellar 

 and pack it from time to time into the space left vacant by the 

 removal of the tubers. The farmer, therefore, rarely learns 

 of the loss he has sustained until he removes the contents of 

 the cellar in the spring, when he is astonished to find, some dis- 



