Albino and Melanistic Pocket Gophers

After 17 years in the gopher control business, we had an interesting "first" today--actually two "firsts" on the same day and from the same jobsite in San Francisco. Pictured to the right are an albino pocket gopher, a melanistic(black) pocket gopher, and a normally colored gopher for comparison. While we see a lot of variation in coloration on the gophers we catch, we have never seen an albino, and we've never seen a melanistic gopher as jet black in color as this specimen.

About 2 weeks after we picked up the gophers above, we caught a second albino at the same job site. This time it was a large adult male. Clearly there is some interesting genetics going on at this particular location.

University of California Gopher Control Study

In December of 2008, we were contacted by Dr. Roger Baldwin, Vertebrate Pest Management Advisor for the University of California's Kearney Agricultural Research Center, about contributing our traps and trapping expertise to a gopher control study that he was planning. Roger's study was designed to compare the efficiency of various methods of gopher control, including trapping, pesticidal baiting, and burrow blasting. The study was to be conducted at a large commercial vineyard owned by the E. J. Gallo company located near Sebastopol in the California wine country.


Sections of the vineyard were divided into equally sized study plots, and we got to put our Gophinator traps to work on 3 study plots totaling approximately 12 acres. These study plots were heavily infested with gophers, and we wound up pulling out about 550 gophers off the plots with an initial treatment and a follow up a couple of weeks later. A small portion of our catch is shown in photo to the right.

When results of the study are published, I'll post them here on the blog.