GOPHERS AND PRAIRIE-DOGS 93 



animals. Care must be taken to draw off the water 

 before it has had time to injure the alfalfa plants. 



Prof. J. G. Haney gives the following excellent 

 advice concerning gophers and alfalfa: 



' ' No preventive has been found. Trapping may- 

 lie employed against them, but it is tedious and gener- 

 ally unsatisfadtory. Poisoning is perhaps the easiest 

 and most satisfadlory method of destroying gophers, 

 and, if properly done, they may be almost entirely 

 exterminated. To poison them, as soon as a fresh 

 mound is seen, cut potatoes as they are usually cut 

 for seed; then, with a pocket-knife or old case-knife, 

 slit the pieces and drop a crystal of strychnine not 

 larger than a wheat grain in the slit, so it will lodge 

 near the middle of the potato. The potato being 

 moist, the strychnine will soon be dissolved and carried 

 all through it, and it should be used at once. Take a 

 spade and a wagon-rod and proceed at once to the 

 ' gopher patch. ' With the rod poke into the ground 

 around the fresh hill until the run is located and open 

 with the spade, drop in a potato, cover up, and pro- 

 ceed to the next hill. Gophers are very fond of 

 potatoes. One dose usually kills; if too much strych- 

 nine is used, or the potatoes are not used as soon as 

 prepared, the poison is not so effedlive. If the field is 

 gone over once a week, the old hills leveled down, and 

 the new ones given a potato, the gopher's work will 

 soon be very much lessened. Now and then one will 

 be too smart for the potato and will keep at work. 

 Try to trap him." 



In Bulletin No. 5 , Division of Ornithology , and 

 Mammalogy, United States Department of Agriculture, 

 is given the following recipe, which reputable persons 



