128 The Pocket Gopher. 



tance below the surface, a huge pile of earth where there 

 should be potatoes or apples. No caving in of the heap in the 

 cellar, no piles of earth on the surface of the ground, have 

 betrayed the gopher's work, which may have been in progress 

 for weeks or months. By making a vigorous search the farmer 

 sometimes recovers a part of his property, however, for the 

 gopher's avarice has prompted him to carry away vastly more 

 than he can possibly ever hope to eat. In the case mentioned 

 above but two gophers could be found to answer to the charge 

 of stealing thirty-five bushels. 



Garden Crops. There are very few garden crops but that 

 receive occasional attention from the pocket gopher. He does 

 not even draw the line at the odoriferous onion, but prefers, of 

 course, the fleshy roots, such as beet, parsnip, carrot and tur- 

 nip. He is also said to have a habit of gnawing into the under 

 side of melons and pumpkins and hollowing out the interior, 

 sometimes filling the cavity thus formed by packing it with 

 earth. I have not been able to verify this statement. Peanut 

 growers suffer some loss from the depredations of pocket 

 gophers. One correspondent, writing to the Department of 

 Agriculture from Reeder, Kan., states that twenty-five bushels 

 were taken from the crop grown on an acre of ground. 



Small Grains. Apparently no serious loss results from the 

 work of pocket' gophers in fields of small grain. The roots of 

 such plants are not large enough to attract the animals. Some- 

 times, though, they bite off and drag stems and heads into their 

 burrows below. When grain is in the shock, too, they often 

 come up from beneath and carry down the heads, filling in the 

 spaces between the sheaves with dirt. It is not fair to lay all 

 such work to their charge, however, for they are assisted by 

 field-mice, spermophiles and the common rat. 



Irrigated Crops. Contrary to my expectations, I did not find 

 the gopher a serious problem in the irrigated districts of the 

 southwestern part of the state. The prairie gopher (Geomys 

 bursarius) of eastern and. central Kansas is there largely re- 

 placed by the plains gopher (Geomys lutescens). I scarcely 

 think the latter is as aggressive in its habits as the former ; at 

 least it has not gained much of a foothold in the extensive 

 fields of alfalfa that have been grown in that section for 

 years. On the other hand, this may be partly or wholly due to 

 the flooding of the fields from the irrigating ditches several 



