Things to know about a gopher's appearance, biology, life cycle, habitat, diet, behavior

Need gopher removal in your hometown? We service over 500 USA locations! Click here to hire us in your town and check prices - updated for year 2020.

An animal that usually ranges from about five to fifteen inches in length, these burrowing rodents are really not the biggest animal that you’ll come up against as a land or property owner. Despite being a small creature, weighing just a pound in most cases, they can cause some pretty extensive damage.



Where do gophers live?
Gophers (or ground squirrels/pocket gophers) are another of the burrowing creatures that you may find you have problems with in your yard. There’s very little chance of seeing one of these in the flesh. They spend almost all of their time underground, about eighteen inches underground, to be exact. If you were to slice off the top layer, you would find one central tunnel with a bunch of smaller tunnels branching out from it. It’s this confusing (to us) tunnel layout that helps them to keep safe. If a predator were able to get inside their burrows, there would be very little chance of them finding anything to prey on. The complicated tunnel system would make that very difficult, often leaving an invader lost and confused.

As well as being quite deep below the ground, these gopher tunnels can be extensive, in some cases, up to six hundred feet worth of tunnel. This causes innumerable damage to land, and it can put lives at risk, causing buildings and other structures to become unstable and unsafe.

Fields of crops, gardens, vegetable patches, parks, and other large lawn spaces provide the perfect home for the average gopher, providing it with everything to stay safe and flourish. Sandy and loose soil makes it easy for the creature to burrow down, and plenty of plants growing on top of that provides cover for when the gopher pops up to eat. If you have a gopher problem on your land, you will more than likely find that you get small hills forming, much like mole hills. This is where the gopher pops its head up from underground to forage for food.

Gophers can live quite close to eat other, and in groups too. In one acre patch of land alone, there can be as many as sixty gophers there, although mothers tend to wander off and care for her young alone, rather than stay in the relative safety of a group.

What do gophers eat?
You’ll know when you have a gopher on your property, rather than a mole, because moles don’t eat plants, but gophers do. They eat a lot too. The biggest of them have been known to eat over half of their own body weight every day. That would be like the average 140-pound woman eat 140 pounds worth of food each day.

Any plants will do. These animals aren’t really that fussy. They’ll eat plants such as trees and shrubs, grasses, roots and bulbs, and they’ll even eat the tubers and the seeds from those plants too. If you have onions, broccoli, Brussel sprouts, cabbage, or other underground-growing foods, they’ll be attacked. Carrots and garlic are other favorites for them, it would seem. They seem to particularly love lettuce.

There aren’t many plant-based foods that these animals won't eat, although it has been reported that they don’t appreciate the taste of rhubarb very much. Some farmers or vegetable-growers have even taken to adding rhubarb around the hardest hit foods, such as lettuce.

Are gophers aggressive?
Gophers very rarely venture to the surface. They would much prefer to tug their underground foods further underground, into their tunnel, rather than go venturing out to hunt for food. It’s dangerous out there, especially for a tiny animal, such as the gopher. There are many predators it needs to worry about, including a few in the air — owls, eagles and hawks. That’s just half the problem too. There are a number of gopher predators on the ground — weasels, badgers, coyotes, snakes, and plenty more.

Male gophers are very aggressive, especially when intruders come along. They will not hesitate to bite a human — adult or child, and a pet cat or dog will come under threat too, should they get too close. These creatures like to live alone, and they don't like sharing their tunnel spaces either. You won't find a mole and a gopher living in the same tunnel system, for example.

Female gophers can be very aggressive when she is taking care of the young, and she tends to do that alone. These critters can breed two to three times every year, which means there’s a good chance any gopher you see will ALWAYS be raising young. They will also always be defending their territories. We recommend that you don't get too close to a gopher, should you see one. You shouldn’t go shoving your hand down any holes that you believe belong to moles either.

How many babies will gophers have?
The better the conditions are, the more frequently the gophers will breed. If the conditions are right, they can have a few litters, each one containing as many as five or six young. Usually, only a few a born — two or three. Those babies stay with their mother for just over a month, usually 40 days, before they are weaned. When they are initially born, they are hairless and they can't see, making them entirely useless, helpless, and dependent on their mother for things like food.

How long do gophers live for?
In the right conditions, a gopher can live for about five or six years. The conditions are rarely right for the animal ‘in the wild’, however, and as well as coming under attack from predators, they also have the risk of starvation, dehydration, hyperthermia, and disease. They will reach their sexual maturity at about twelve months of age, but rarely live longer than 2/3 years.

Read the How to Get Rid of Gophers page.
For more information, you may want to click on one of these guides that I wrote:
How To Guide: Who should I hire? - What questions to ask, to look for, who NOT to hire.
How To Guide: do it yourself! - Advice on saving money by doing wildlife removal yourself.
Guide: How much does wildlife removal cost? - Analysis of wildlife control prices.