On Sat, 18 Sep 2004 16:24:40 GMT, Ron Hardin
wrote:


I always liked them around. They're also easy to tame, if you're willing
to sit motionless for the longest time offering food, say peanut butter
on a stick. You have to be motionless less and less time until it's
nothing at all. This is when I was a kid, but they may have changed under
the influence of TV or something, for all I know. Something must eat them
where I live now because I don't see any.

I don't know that they find their way back at all. They just repopulate
where there's favorable conditions, as long as there's a breeding population.
They must have a litter every month. So they ``fill up'' the available slots
pretty fast, and die out beyond that.


Oh yeah. They're cute?

A mile away the developers were poisoning a large colony of
Richardson's Ground Squirrels, that's the gopher's ID around here,
and one of them must have panicked and made its home under my front
concrete landing. I generally love all god's creatures so I left it
alone and even fed it with nuts on occasion. Looks like it didn't
like to live alone and disappeared over the winter.

Two years later I was on a 6 ft ladder to paint the window trim when
one leg started to sink into the ground. I was only about 4 steps up
so it shouldn't be difficult to jump off. But I didn't figure that
the weight of the remaining foot on the step I used to jump off from
would cause the ladder's single leg to break through the gopher
tunnel roof. Yup, that was the problem. The gopher had tunnelled from
the landing along the edge of the wall to a bush.

So my jump was totally screwed up and I tumbled causing my elbow to
jab into my ribs. The pain was excruiating and affected the whole
left side of everything. At that point I couldn't even identify the
injury because it was so broad. X-rays, Dr. examinations, etc.
Luckily nothing seemed broken but the pain only faded after a month.

I'll stick to feeding the birds.