Hiking the grassland and pasture this morning was my first foray into the fields looking for pocket gophers this year. They're called pocket gophers because they have pockets inside their cheeks for storing seeds. They spend almost all of their time below ground making tunnels and pushing up large mounds of dirt. Last year I found nine places where badgers had dug them out. Badgers are great diggers, sometimes digging down through the hard packed surfaces of dirt roads. When badgers dig out pocket gophers they leave a mess of holes but at least that stops the gophers making mounds.
There was no evidence of badgers finding pocket gophers this year. But, they had made a mess in the pasture where they dug multitudes of holes, with attendant mounds of dirt, seeking striped gophers...technically, thirteen lined ground squirrels. While I welcome badgers to share the land their mounds are more troublesome than are the gophers. Perhaps I can level them off the mounds before they become permanent.
Being on the land again is good for my soul. Kaia thoroughly enjoyed running free. She came home caked with mud from the slough but she was good in the shower. She flushed a couple of pheasants and a large coyote. She enjoys racing birds that fly overhead. There was a large pad (yes that what a group is called) of pelicans on a neighboring slough. Pelicans make me happy!
Takk for alt,
Al
1 comment:
A wonderful bird is the pelican
His beak can hold more than his belly can. And in that there beak he'll store food for a week. But I don't know how the h*** he can.
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