Why growing gopher mounds could mean a flurry of furries

My late father-in-law was an avid gardener.

He was a pleasantly calm man but his feathers would ruffle when he found evidence of gophers in his garden. He spent hours every weekend trying to outsmart them. The only time I ever heard him utter an expletive was when his latest defense against them failed. 

I thought of him this morning when I discovered two neatly sculptured dirt mounds in my front yard. I don’t recall ever having seen an actual gopher before. I had just witnessed the aftermath of the damage they did. So I knew what the mounds meant. Now I finally understood my father-in-law’s frustration when, in the short time it took me to walk to the driveway and pick up the newspaper, another little mound had popped up.

“What are you doing down there?” I barked into the hole at the top at the mound. Picturing gophers in the underground tunnels turning my front yard into food storage pantries, I was wondering about the set up. Do they live in little apartments? Is it a condominium with a homeowner’s association? Should they be paying me dues?

Listen, guys, if you are here now, could you make some kind of sound to let me know? Maybe you can teach me gopher speak

Remembering how my father-in-law took personal offense when the G-guys messed with his fruit trees, I panicked that my lemon tree could be in danger. It’s ridiculous how much I love that tree.

I tip-toed up the driveway so they couldn’t hear me coming. This was the first sign that I was unraveling. Would I be driven to set painful traps and spray poisonous deterrents, things to which I am morally opposed?

“Have they been here?” I demanded of the ripening lemons.  There was no evidence, at least not yet. Would the tree be sinking into an underground tunnel by the time I awoke in the morning?

Should I set up a lookout point on the deck where the lemons overhang the trellis? 

I imagined a flurry of furries digging around the concrete footings that George had so carefully poured when he built the deck 35 years ago. Over time the deck has unwittingly hosted coyotes, squirrels, a raccoon and an opossum with a shockingly long snout. Maybe the gophers got jealous.

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