GORD TURNER
So my friend Cee phones me at 7 a.m. to make an announcement. “Gord,” he says, “I’ve been watching an animal.” Now because he’s a bit of a joker, I’m wondering what’s coming next. Are we talking “bear, elk, deer, cougar”—or something else?
“It keeps sunning itself. It lies there in all its glory soaking up the sunshine. You need to write a column about it.” I’m still lying in bed, mostly asleep, and Cee is encouraging me to put a few paragraphs together on behalf of this animal. I rub my eyes and groan. Finally, I ask him what kind of creature he’s going on about.
It turns out it’s larger than a gopher, and it’s sleek and furry. After he looked it up, he determined it was a groundhog. He said that at certain times of the day it comes out, gets on top of a pile of wooden pallets, and simply falls asleep in the sunshine. He watches it from one of his windows and eventually had a friend come over to his place and take a photo.
So because Cee is a long-time buddy of mine and I owe him for helping me with many things over the past, I’m struggling to find enough fodder in this item to feed a column. Then I recalled another friend talking about the groundhogs running rampant over at Kinnaird Elementary, so I decided I’d have a look—and then maybe there’d be more than one sun-bathing animal to write about.
So after a torrential downpour and minor hailstorm recently, I sauntered down to the Kinnaird schoolyard. There I found lots of animals frolicking in the wet grass and slithering down escape holes to get away from me.
Only they weren’t groundhogs. Despite one or two being a bit larger, they were clearly gophers, a version of the species known as Richardson Ground Squirrel. There were lots of them—along the fence on the gymnastic playground and on the edge of the soccer pitch.
However, these creatures are not dangerous to children. They don’t bite humans unless you catch them and hold them. Also, because they are consummate vegetarians, they don’t eat anything for us to be anxious about. Of course, I worry about the children spraining their ankles by stepping in the gopher holes, but these holes seem to be away from the main activity areas. To be on the safe side though, perhaps School District maintenance could eliminate these beasts this summer.
On a tip, I headed out to Selkirk College’s Castlegar Campus looking for groundhogs. On the front lawns of the main buildings, several animals scrambled across the grass and then stood up like sentries. I could almost hear them wondering, “Why is this new guy here watching us?”
These Richardson Ground Squirrels (gophers) are huge, much larger than their prairie counterparts. At the Castlegar Campus, these creatures are fat, dig holes in the lawns, hide out in the cement dividers along the roadways, and are overrunning the place.
I remember the biologists and the renewable resources instructors being intrigued when these animals initially made their homes at the College, but I’m not certain that’s the case today. They clearly have become pests.
I believe some of these gophers have migrated to the Castlegar Golf Course. I’ve seen them bouncing along on at least two fairways. These gophers will have a short life as our golf course is quite pristine, and the maintenance crew won’t be happy about gopher holes ruining it.
As for my hunt for a groundhog, I guess I’ll have to visit Cee one day soon and wait for “his animal” to resume basking in the sun.