Just got back from a week in Mexico. Some Avocado growers from the Mexican state of Jalisco were having a very serious problem with gophers chewing the roots off of young avocado trees, and they bought some traps from me. They had lost a couple of hundred 2 to 3 year old trees, with estimated damages in the $15,000 range. In talking with these guys a little bit, I decided it would be fun to go down there and give them a demonstration--I don't need much of an excuse to escape from my daily grind for a week. Here's some pictures below of the region(which is stunningly beautiful), and of the ADC work we did down there on the gophers.
The region is known as the "Sierra del Tigre", and is part of the Sierra Madre Ocidental. We were working at elevations of about 7,000 feet, in mountainous areas with pine forests.
This is taken from the south shore of Laguna Chapala, a beautiful lake just south of Mexico's second largest city of Guadalajara, Jalisco. The shores of this lake are home to the largest community of Americans anywhere outside the USA's borders.
This is the avocado growing region up in the Sierra del Tigre, at 7,000 feet elevation. Growers have discovered that soil and climate conditions in this region are a good fit for avocado growing, and the land is being bought up and cleared by growers for avocado groves.
This is a two to three year old avocado tree that was perfectly healthy one day, and showed wilting or "flagging" leaves the next day.
And a gentle tug on the trunk of the young tree reveals the problem, gophers have completely chewed off all the roots of the tree, killing it outright. A two to three year investment of time and money go down the drain in a single night. I don't think the gophers are even eating the roots of the avocado trees, but are just gnawing on the hard wood to help wear down and sharpen their teeth, which grow continuously. The real food source for the gophers is all the green vegetation and "weeds" that grow between the trees in the groves.
Here we have our ADC service vehicles ready to go. Horses came in handy on this job, as there had been some recent rain, and the pickups couldn't make it up some of the steep muddy roads.
This is propery owner Salvador Haro with a box of gophinators, ready to go to work.
And here are the culprits, I think these are Cratogeomys fumosus, the "smoky pocket gopher" which is native to the region. Hard to be sure, as Jalisco is sort of the unofficial gopher capital of the world, with seven different species. These guys were up to 13 inches long, tip of tail to snout, but also very beefy. I had made some traps with larger jaw spreads to go after these guys, and we had moderate success, but I really need to make up a larger and more powerful trap for this species. Still, the property owner was thrilled to have a reasonably successful solution to what had become a very expensive and frustrating problem.
Just one more shot of the stunning scenery in this part of Mexico. This is taken at about 7,500 feet elevation in the vicinity of Patzcuaro, in the neighboring state of Michoacan.
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