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of hearing plays any very important part in their life. Merriam 
suggests that the naked tail may serve as an organ of touch to guide 
the animal when running backward through its burrow. 
The food of this gopher consists largely of such vegetable matter 
as can be obtained under ground, that is, roots, tubers, and rhizomes 
of various plants. They use practically everything of this kind that 
they meet with. Even trees so large as six inches in diameter have 
the roots cut off and eaten by them. They also come out of their 
burrows at night under cover of vegetation and eat and carry away 
seeds and vegetative parts of plants. These are stored in their 
pouches and carried to underground storehouses connected with 
their runways. 
The pocket-gopher is not known to hibernate. Where the 
ground does not freeze severely it may continue burrowing all winter, 
storing the dirt from its excavations under the snow. 
Pocket-gophers are not fertile when compared with most other 
mammals, and their abundance in certain localities is due rather to 
their ability to escape their enemies than to their fertility. Avail- 
able data indicate that while two to six may be produced in a litter 
the average number is about three, and that there is but one litter 
a year. The young are born in spring, about the end of April. By 
the middle of June they may be half grown and starting their own 
burrows. 
As these gophers appear so rarely above ground, they suffer com- 
paratively little from natural enemies. A few are killed by hawks, 
still more are caught by owls, and probably all the larger Carnivora 
sometimes surprise and capture them; but once safe in their burrows, 
even the fox and the badger can not easily get them. Probably 
their chief enemies in this state are the weasel and some species of 
snakes. The former is able to follow the gopher into its burrow and 
kill it, and it is known that some of the larger snakes do the same. 
In this part of the state, pocket-gophers are too rare to be of any 
importance economically, but in other sections of the country they 
are often a serious pest. In nurseries and forest plantations they 
do great damage by gnawing off the roots of small trees. When 
they attack a tree their habit is to gnaw off all the roots at the base, 
thus leaving the tree without any means of support. Trees of con- 
siderable size are destroyed in this way. These gophers do great 
damage to root-crops also, potatoes being sometimes so badly in- 
