Gophers

My students read a current events article today from www.lesplan.com about the multitude of gophers in Saskatchewan and how they are destroying crops and farmers' livelihoods. The article reminded me of Farley Mowat's book Owls in the Family, a book that I read aloud earlier to my class this year. I read a passage from the book again today (to model making connections), in which the narrator of the story describes gophers as "the commonest thing on the prairie". The narrator continues by writing:

The little mounds of yellow dirt around their burrows were so thick, sometimes, it looked as if the field had yellow measles.

When I checked my mailslot today, I found my latest issue of Canada's History, a magazine of, well, Canadian history. Inside is an article about a trio of quirky museums, one of which is the Gopher Hole Museum in Alberta, in a small town called Torrington. A gopher museum? Apparently, the museum has forty-five dioramas of seventy-one stuffed gophers that "cheekily depict the community's social anchors". That's just too funny! Put that on the list of places to see when the family goes out West for a future vacation.

A video of the museum can be found here.

Maybe a community or two in Saskatchewan could do the same and decrease their gopher population...