Because I grow garlic, onions, carrots, beets, melons, and squash, (all suitable to the gopherian palate) and because I am therefore out in the garden a lot, I witness the results of this rodent's tastes and appetites. It is not unusual to catch sight and sound of a plant making helpless rustling whimpers as the unseen varmit tugs it under the ground's surface, a helpless victim to the "Jaws" of the garden.
Though you may often catch them in the act of pushing up the fine texture earth, it is unusual to actually see the creatures out and about on the surface. So it was a little unusual when a gopher came out of his burrow and foraged in the grass next to my garden one sunny summer day. I walked up to him. He was unconcerned, and continued about his business.
I was afraid and figured he must be diseased - maybe rabid. As I stood over this near-sighted and stub-tailed rodent his charactor seemed to me a little bit like a grumpy old man. Unafraid of anything, or at least not of me. Or perhaps he was just old and ready to die, and so doing this foolish thing, offering his body to the dangers of open ground on a sunny day.
I could have pounded him flat with my shovel. Instead, I bent, broke off a stem of grass, and cautiously tickled his whiskers.
He immediatedly rolled his fat body back on his haunches, closed his eyes, shook his head and rubbed furiously at his whiskers. He seemed quite irritated. nothing short of disgusted.
When he had re-arranged his whiskers to his satisfaction he turned busily back to foraging. So I mercilessly tickled his whiskers again.
Again he sat back on his haunches, rubbing his face, adjusting his whiskers. He now seemed disgusted. We repeated this little dance three or four more times. Finally, not going to take it any more, he lumbered over to another gopher hole and disappeared underground, completely fed up, ready this day perhaps to face his death by cat, dog, or hawk, but not prepared to be insulted by having his whiskers repeatedly mussed.
I was tickled myself, a later day, another season, when I came across the following passage in Gary Paul Nabhan's book, Enduring Seeds, of a conversation he had with a Native American friend.
Once I discovered some gopher holes in a friend's field, near one of his melon vines, which appeared damaged. I wondered if he controlled these burrowing animals.
"I thought about it, now that my wife is old, but I still leave those gophers alone."
"Now that your wife is old?"
"They say that if you mess with the gophers it will disrupt the ladies' monthly sickness when they are young. You aren't supposed to kill those gophers or even touch the plants they've been chewing on. You just let them be." Then he smiled. "Now that she's too old for that, I've been thinking about getting some of that . . . what do you call it? Gopher-Go? But I just don't know."
The mythology of an ancient and enduring agri-culture held open a place for gophers in the life of the garden.
So I now confess - no gophers are trapped, poisoned, or otherwise actively pursued by human beings on the 4 and a half acres I farm. What that says about me as a farmer remains (I faithfully believe) still not completely resolved against me.
The cost of leaving the little critters alone seems fairly evident in the loss of garlic and onions and summer vines. Some years I have lost better than 1/3 of my garlic plants to gophers. But 1/3 of the plants doesn't represent 1/3 of a harvest. It may be a good deal less. How their presence may affect my other crops remains unknown. Some evidence to their defence exists.
For starters, the soil they clean out of their burrows is fine and crumbly, good enough for scooping up and mixing in potting mix for starting spring tomatoes, peppers, and eggplant. It mixes easily with compost and ashes.
Another clue came during garlic harvest several years ago, before I had stopped trapping them. I was digging garlic with a shovel when I brought up a spade of earth with the cross section of an abandoned gopher tunnel running through the center of it. I knew it was abandoned because delicate white root hairs were growing through the airy center.
These fine root hairs were there, evidently, to condense and suck up the moisture in the air, as well as "breath" the air itself. It was my first hint at understanding how a healthy soil "respires". And I soon began to imagine other ways a gopher and tunnel might deepen the soil's microfloral breath.
For example, as they move down their tunnels their bodies serve as a little piston, pushing the air ahead of them, pulling it along behind, freshening the soil with every little move and fidget. The tunnel vents themselves draw fresh air, and the moisture in the gopher's breath adds humidity to the air. "Gopher Breath."
Last fall I was chopping into a weedy mound of earth, to fill a hole I had dug in the spring, when I spied a sleepy, short-winged, black, bumblebee tumbling and buzzing on the fresh turned earth. Another chop with my hoe brought up another one. I then spied the gopher hole I had been chopping into.
Tunnels, made and abandoned by the gophers, now housed these big clumsy bees. Seeing them allowed me to imagine that there are other species that benefit from these tunnels too.
Every life in the garden is the point of a vortex that expands outward and who's tangled threads confound our reason. I have but just begun to wonder.
The new science of chaos theory states that it is possible for a butterfly to flap its wings in our back yard and trigger a violent hurricane on the other side of the planet. Who can say what action leads to good end? Maybe butterflies trigger cyclones, and maybe disturbing gophers messes with the woman's cycle.
What I do know is that by letting the gophers be, I am happily tossing my qualifications as a farmer into that chaos. All I ask, and blindly trust, is that the Mystery will allow me to remain standing firmly, for awhile, on this wonderful farmable ground.
So when people ask "What do you do to control gophers?" I half jokingly respond, "Nothing! I'm too busy worrying about how I'm going to farm when the Grizzlies come back!"
For more gopher stuff go here.
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