Stories From Under The Sky

Geomys

geomys UNDERGROUND, IN THE dark cool world of roots, grubs and earthworms, lives the Digger. He is dedicated - heart, tooth and nail - to tunnelling. He is king of the miners, this "pocket gopher," and while a badger can dig faster he can't match the gopher's tireless capacity for drilling through real estate. One gopher dug three hundred feet in a single night. This might compare with a I50-pound man digging a trench seventeen inches wide and deep and seven miles long in ten hours. You've probably never seen a pocket gopher. Like the mole, he's known less for his person than for his works - the fan-shaped mounds of fresh earth that appear in hayfields, pastures and roadsides where the Digger has pushed his loose excavate up to the surface. He doesn't like to be above-ground. When he is topside the Digger is nervous and uneasy, moving in a small area with swiftness and economy of motion. He feeds or gathers nest material swiftly, cutting vegetation and stuffing it into the cheek pouches that named him. 55 The pocket gopher's scientific name, Geomys bursarius, literally means "earth mouse with pockets." Unlike most rodents, his facial pouches are true pockets and not just loose cheeks. They are lined with fur and open to the inside of the mouth through small slits near the lower jaw. Surprisingly capacious, these extend from the cheeks back along the neck to the shoulders, and are never used to carry dirt but only food and nesting material. With his front feet the gopher stuffs cut grass first into one cheek pocket and then the other. He can pack away enough food for a full meal in half a minute. Then he pops back into his tunnel and slams the door behind him, a neat trick accomplished by shoving a bit of loose soil into place for an entrance plug. Once sealed inside, he drops down a foot or two into a horizontal feeding tunnel, part of a burrow complex that may include a half-mile of winding, twisting passages. Here and there along these feeding tunnels are small pantries or food chambers packed with all sorts of trash - moldy roots, withering grass and other stale food items that the Digger couldn't resist bringing home, but which he's never quite gotten around to using. Somewhere in this maze of feeding tunnels is another downward shaft that leads to the Digger's private chambers. The master bedroom may be as much as eleven feet beneath the earth's surface, and although a few tunnels wander off from this chamber, they are not as extensive as the food tunnels above. Even in this nesting chamber the pocket gopher packs food and finely-cut grass. If it begins to spoil and becomes too much for him, he simply moves to another chamber. But if the Digger isn't neat, he is always clean and sometimes even has latrines along his passageways - small pits that are periodically covered and abandoned. When a gopher gets a yen for fresh provender, he goes upstairs to the end of a feeding tunnel and begins to ex- An unusual photo, demonstrating the pocket gopher's method of pushing excavated soil up to the earth's surface with his brefeet and nose. Taken in a glass-walled terrarium. tend it. He works with his heavy front claws, loosening dirt and shoving it back between his front legs, beneath his body, and out behind him. During his mining his eyes are tightly closed and the lids permit no soil particles to get into his eyes. Even his ears are valved to prevent the entry of dirt. If the soil is hard and dry, he may use his great yellow incisors to loosen it, for like the beaver his lips can be closed behind the front teeth to keep dirt out of his mouth. 57 When a quantity of loose soil has accumulated behind him, the gopher pokes his head between his front legs, back between his hind legs, and twists at the same time. With a deft flip he is then facing the other way in his tight tunnel. Lying on his belly, he places his front feet, claws upward, in front of his face. Then he drives forward with his hind legs, a miniature bulldozer pushing the loose dirt before it. When there is...