Town Terminator
New system effective in fighting prairie dogs

By KAY LEDBETTER
kay.ledbetter@amarillo.com
The Amarillo Globe-News

Dumas - David Terrell has been battling prairie dogs since he started farming. But the last four of five years, Terrell said, they seem to be getting thicker.

"They kill everything. It's just bare ground," he said. "Especially since it's been so dry. "We're not that big. We've probably lost 60 out of our 80 acres of grass and now they're working their way out into the cropland" Terrell said.

He was busy getting all the information he could from Dan Newton, a co-founder of the Rodex Sales & Service Pest Elimination System, during the High Plains Ag Expo here on Tuesday.

Terrell said they are looking to control the prairie dogs, because "they seem to be coming in from everywhere." He said another prairie dog town just popped up about a month ago. There's nothing to eat, so they are on the move. And he knows the damage they do. "We used to row water and when it would reach one of those holes, it would just keep going down it. You can lose a lot of water down one of those holes," he said.

Newton, who operates out of Ontario, Ore., knows the frustration. The Rodex system spawned from some of the very same frustration. "It was never meant to be sold," he said. "it was just to be used on the ranch. The more the neighbors saw it, the more we built." Newton said he took it to the Tulare, Calif., farm show to see how marketable it was and his five guns sold, along with requests for 19 others.

The Rodex system is an applicator device that injects a mixture of 97 percent oxygen and 3 percent propane into the prairie dog, mole or pocket gopher hole. When the two gases are ignited, the concussive force travels at about 5,000 feet per second, he said.

The systems is considered to be environmentally friendly, humane and effective, he said. And, it cost about 15 cents per hole to treat.

With pocket gophers, he said it destroys their whole system. "In prairie dog towns, it's important to distinguish between the breather and escape holes and the main one, which will have a cone", Newton said.

Once the blast is made in the hole, he said the hole should be covered. He suggested working the prairie dog town in sections and the kill rate should be 99 percent.

The device comes in two models, one offers a detonation arrester and it costs $1,875 and the other has a ball valve flash back arrester, and it sells for $1,475.

Newton said they have done a considerable amount of work around Lubbock with the Rodex system and there are people who are buying the setup and then contracting out to go do the work for others. He said depending on the severity of the infestation, it takes about a day of going to each hole to treat about 40 acres. Newton warned the one drawback might be there is a danger of fire if treating among dry grass.

For more information, Newton can be contacted by e-mail at dan52@fmtc.com or he can be reached by telephone at (541) 889-7775.

Web-posted January 6, 2005 ~ www.hastingsreserve.org

Gophers- Acorn Challenge Number One

If you have ever had a grass lawn in suburban California, you will soon find that Gophers will find it, and burrow in it. Each day, one gopher can excavate enough soil, and carry it above ground to form loose piles about six inches deep that can cover several square feet. At Hastings, we find that from 30% to 50% of the soil surface is covered each year with these piles of gopher diggings, or tunnel tailings.

Think about this for a minute. It is like the soil is boiling! If the gophers cover 30% of the soil in one year, (about 3" deep) this means they bury everything in 3 years. In 100 years, they can bury the same area something 30 times over, or about 8 feet deep!

Although we don’t see it in our fast lives, an oak tree that lives up to 400 years will effectively be floating on a boiling surface of soil. Archeologists in California have observed this effect for a long time and have a name for it- "faunal turbation". For an archeologist, this means that if a person dropped a stone tool 400 years ago, it could be found now anywhere from the surface to 8 feet deep. "Faunal" refers to animals, (gophers) and "turbation" means mixing or stirring up.

Why are there so many gophers? Is there something wrong with this picture? Maybe. We do know that the non-native grasslands, as studied at Hastings, have a density of gophers only exceeded in some alfalfa fields. There can be as many as 2,000 gophers per acre. Gophers relish the non-native annual grasses as food, and the non-native grasses have a 3:1 advantage over native grasses in growing on the freshly tilled, bare soil provided by gophers. Gophers may have stumbled across the very successful technique of farming annual grasses by providing an annual abundance of tilled soil, just as we farm by tilling the soil and planting an annual grass- wheat. By "farming" non-native, annual grasses, gophers (like people) are probably supporting much higher populations than otherwise possible. Predators on gophers (hawks, weasels, badgers, bears) have been all but eliminated from the scene by humans. Such predators may not have been that important anyway in "controlling" the number of gophers - very often predator numbers only rise after the number of their prey rise. In turn, prey animals are typically held in check by their (plant) food supply. If the food supply (plants) goes down, the gopher numbers drop, and then the predator numbers decrease. In any event, gopher numbers remain impressive. And as long as they are so abundant, few acorns make it past this part of the gauntlet. But wait. There is more! Read about the annual weeds.