Harassing Gophers

Weather: A typical storm cycle this week. On Sunday, the weather bureau said there was a 60% chance of rain or snow in Los Alamo, continuing Tuesday, with remnants through Thursday. The satellite showed moisture moving across the entire length of the Baja peninsula.

Monday, the chance of rain or snow that night was 100%. The Baja moisture was coming up from the south, but only a little was getting this far north. By the afternoon, the forecast had changed: the storm would end on Tuesday, while the satellite showed most of the moisture then was going into Texas.

Tuesday, about 4" of snow accumulated outside the house. It stopped soon after 9 am. The satellite showed the moisture stream had split, with most going to Texas, and a little coming to the Española valley. By mid afternoon, the snow had melted or condensed down to an inch or so on the ground.

Nothing on Wednesday or Thursday except soft ground in places.

Last snow: 2/11. Week’s low: 18 degrees F. Week’s high: 58 degrees F in the shade.

What’s green: The junipers, yuccas, and other evergreens, grape hyacinths, vinca, coral bell, blue flax and Mexican hat leaves

What’s turned red or purple: Sandbar willow and some rose branches; alfilerillo and coral beards tongue leaves

What’ turned brown or yellow: Weeping willow, arborvitae and some other evergreen leaves

Tasks: This afternoon I dumped more stones onto bald spots in the drive. There were places outside the drive path where stones either had been pushed by tires, or were dumped by the man working on my drive several years ago. I used my foot to slide the top stones along the surface until they covered the bare areas. Then, I used my foot to relevel the cannibalized areas. The side of my foot actually works better than a hoe because it stays on the surface. The iron blade tends to dig down a bit.

Animal sightings: I started to reroute a block path after I finished kicking around the gravel. When I first laid it, it was forced to created a bypass around a winterfat stump. A rose mistook the blocks as a personal gift of mulch. I was moving the blocks to the other side of the stump. When I picked up one block, I discovered an active colony of shiny black ants.

Weekly update: The first year I tried tulip bulbs, I planted them along my retaining wall. None came up, and I blamed that generic villain—the gopher.

Before I planted bulbs again I bought some shakers of cheap black pepper and sprinkled the cracked seeds in the holes with the bulbs. At the time, I knew that peppercorns lost their potency when they were ground, but hoped they would still act as a deterrent.

I later heard chili peppers were more lethal. I sprinkled some around what I thought was a snake hole last summer. I hoped that even if the ground spice no longer was any good for cooking, the granules might have retained enough of their chemicals so they would become activated when they got wet—either by contact with the skin or by being licked out of fur.

I had no intention of killing the animal, whatever it was, that made the hole. I hoped to drive it away by harassing it.

Scott Long said one method tried against pocket gophers was pouring "pepper oil extract (capsicum) into the soil." He added: "this irritant is effective in making gophers avoid that area." [1]

Last week I was reading a collection of African-American folklore. Around 1917, a seventy-year old man living on the North Carolina Piedmont said witches stepped out of their skins when they left their homes by the chimneys. One time when they were gone, someone "get two pods of red pepper." When they returned, they couldn’t get back into their skins because "it was hot." They hid in the sheets, but died when daylight hit their denuded bodies. [2]

Elsie Clews Parsons indicated the belief about the skin was found in the Bahamas, the Leeward Islands, and in Guiana. [3] Newell Niles Puckett noted the belief had been reported from Georgia, Missouri, Virginia, Louisiana, North Carolina, the Sea Islands, and West Africa. [4]

The primary difference was the kind of pepper. He said Vais of West Africa sprinkled salt and pepper in the room to "prevent her from getting back into her hide." Parsons said salt and pepper were used on Andros Islands in the Bahamas.

Chili peppers are a New World plant, and anyone who’s gotten near them knows about their affects on the skin. It took no imagination to substitute them into the traditional tales and practices.

I talked to a woman a couple years ago who remembered when she was a child, her mother warned her to wear gloves when she was picking the pods. Being young and invincible, she ignored the advice.

She was a cashier in a local market. When she said she used lotion and cold water to treat her hands, the man bagging the groceries suggested vinegar would help. She agreed, and said "these are the tricks you learn as you grow."

Notes on photographs:
1. Clouds on Monday afternoon, around 4:45 pm.
2. Snow near the house on Tuesday morning, just before noon.
3. The same area today.

End notes:
1. Scott Long. "Thomomys talpoides, Northern Pocket Gopher." University of Michigan website. 15 June 2008.

2. Carter Young. "Out of Her Skin." Collected by Elsie Clews Parsons. "Tales from Guilford County, North Carolina." The Journal of American Folklore 30:168–200:1917. 187–188.

3. Parsons. 187.

4. Newbell Niles Puckett. "Driving off and Capturing Witches." Folk Beliefs of the Southern Negro. Chapel Hill: The University of North Carolina Press, 1926. 154–155.