Real life isn't always pretty

Monday, March 19, 2007 Filed in: General gun stuff, My Life
Well, I had a nice weekend...took Friday off, went to Eastern Oregon (so capitalized because it is like a completely separate state.) The destination was my cousin's ranch, where we were to exercise our trigger fingers in decreasing the population of a local pest known as the Sage Rat (spermophilus townsendii mollis kennicott, aka "Townsend's Ground Squirrel".)

Many folks live their lives in the city and are unfamiliar with the problems ranchers face in producing the food they eat. To those who think that beef originates in the supermarket, this may seem to be a barbaric blood sport. It is anything but.

The Sage Rat is widely distributed in Eastern Oregon. They prefer to burrow in irrigated fields, and they eat green grasses. (Beginning to spot the problem?) If that's not enough, their muli-tubed burrows can be up to 100 feet long.

Imagine, now, that you're a rancher who has spent a not inconsiderable amount of money turning the desert into an oasis; you've dug a deep well, bought the necessary irrigation gear, and plowed and seeded the field. Remember, you're doing all this out in the middle of nowhere, in what's known as the High Desert (and for good reason.) Your green and tender alfalfa shoots are just poking out of the soil, and you anticipate being able to easily feed your cows during the long, cold desert winter.

Along comes the sage rat, who promptly sets up shop in this wonderfully soft soil you've toiled to prepare. He meets a cute female sage rat, nature takes its course, and they are soon blessed with a litter of junior sage rats. Like all adolescents, the kids are eating machines - and they just happen to have made their home in the middle of a rodent supermarket!

You can only imagine what a large number of sage rats can do to a field; it's not unusual for a good sized field to harbor many thousands of the little critters, every one of which is bent on eating everything he can get his little incisors around.

That's not the end of the problems, though. Their burrows, which are below the root level of the alfalfa, take the irrigation water and channel it away from the plants that need it. The sage rats attract badgers, which dig huge holes in the fields, holes that can easily break a large animal's legs. They also attract the coyotes, who bring assorted problems of their own.

When you consider this, you can see why the ranchers and farmers need to control the artificially large populations of sage rats. Hence, the reason for our seven-hour drive out to my cousin's ranch.

To be continued....

-=[ Grant ]=-
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