Wildlife Wednesday - Life Underground

By Andy Ames

If it seems like you are seeing a lot of new gopher mounds lately, you are right. Gopher activity peaks in spring and fall and with this year’s young recently dispersed there is now more activity than ever. Each gopher can create one to three new mounds per day. Each burrow may have a hundred or more mounds in total. One gopher may move more than a ton of soil per year! While evidence of their presence is often obvious, they are rarely seen which, to me, makes them one of the most mysterious and fascinating animals of the Estes Valley.

To learn more about the Northern pocket gopher and what makes them so special visit https://www.evwatershed.org/blog/wildlife-wednesday-pocket-gopher.

Pocket gophers push dirt out of their burrows with their front feet and chest. Note it’s tiny eyes and ears. Living almost entirely underground, sight and hearing are of little importance. It is able to navigate its subterranean world with its sensitive whiskers and tail and its keen sense of smell.

Gophers strategically push dirt to form a fan shaped mound from the burrow hole. As a finishing touch, the gopher will form a plug of the hole leaving little evidence of its entrance.

Diagram showing the inner complexity of a gopher’s home. An individual burrow may be over a hundred feet long, several feet deep, and include over a hundred surface mounds. The flush plug at right is for one of its feeding holes. Pocket gophers can feed on roots and tubers from shallow tunnels below ground. They may even pull a whole plant down by its roots into its tunnel. Other times it may create a short tunnel to the surface. From this feeding hole it will gather vegetation (leaves and stems) it can find within a body length or so and plug it up again when finished.

A newly created gopher mound created from excavated dirt from its burrow. The plug is at the upper left with the rest of the debris fanning toward the right.