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Show Texas Gophers Cause Damage Of $5,000,000 DALLAS, TEX. One of the greatest great-est undermining influences in Texas is a biscuit-bodied, Roman-nosed rodent ro-dent called the pocket gopher. This burrowing, little fellow did at least five million dollars worth of crop damage in Texas in a recent re-cent 12-month period, according to Donald A. Spencer, government biologist, bi-ologist, who has trapped thousands of gophers. , Besides destroying crops, these underground mischief-makers fc holes in levees, undermine hard-surface hard-surface roads and even cause train wrecks by tunneling beneath right-of-ways. Spencer, speaking at a Dallas forum on rodent poisoning, .called the gopher the most hermit-like and foul-tempered of all western creatures. crea-tures. A gopher stays strictly .to himself all his life except for a few weeks when he is young and except ex-cept during the brief breeding seasons. sea-sons. Individual Tunnels. Every adult gopher has his individual indi-vidual underground system of tunnels, tun-nels, storehouses (Spencer calls them pantries) and sleeping dens. The female gopher is always alone in her den when the little ones arrive. ar-rive. Usually, these tunnel systems sys-tems are under a row crop, a lawn, a golf course or any place where there are succulent roots. The roots and other foodstuffs are gnawed into neat little strips and stored in the pantries for use when little is growing or there is a drouth. A gopher never drinks water. . He gets enough moisture from the water content of the food he eats. Besides his powerful claws,, the gopher has huge incisor teeth for digging. The mouth closes behind these incisors. The pocket gopher gets his name from cheek pouches on either side of his mouth. He uses these cheek pouches to carry food and to haul dirt out of the burrows. bur-rows. Many Different Types. Spencer said that Texas Agricultural Agricul-tural and Mechanical college investigators inves-tigators had found 18 types of pocket pock-et gophers in that state. A Dallas gopher is about the size of a house rat, only blunter of head, - shorter of tall and much chunkier. - A gopher fits in his tunnel like, a piston in a cylinder, Spencer declared. de-clared. He can back up as fast as he can go forward. He's not polite, po-lite, though, and when angry will attack any foe and fight to the death. Gophers won't live together in captivity. A few minutes after being caged they usually have a death struggle. Spencer usually locates them by the mounds of fresh dirt which they throw out through a small hole while digging their tunnels. Then the biologist sticks a poisoned bait down the hole. After one gopher is killed, though, another seems to take over the tunnel system immediately. imme-diately. About the only real service the pocket gopher performs is in improving im-proving sub-soil by dragging organic organ-ic matter underground. |