Saturday, January 28, 2017

Gophers to Rave About

I've talked about it over on the Facebook side of, "The Wild Airport" but I don't think I've touched on it over here -- it being the simple fact that whenever the airfield sees heavy rains many gophers are flooded from their burrows.
We in Operations end up removing a good number of these drowned lil' critters and with good reason. Flooded out, dead gophers attract predators, and the longer they sit out the more predators they bring in. I remember one year after a really heavy rain we started seeing a whole lot of hawks, crows, ravens, and vultures near the approach end of main runway. This influx of bird activity presented a huge threat to the safety of aircraft using our airport and as such I finally just walked the infields with a bucket to collect them up. I ended removing nearly six five-gallon buckets full of dead gophers, which did greatly reduce the interest of the birds.






Here a Common Raven (Corvus corax) circles me as if to show off it's catch.