Another Wild Critter Life-List Entry

This close-encounter-of-the-third-kind saga was foreshadowed by a conversation on Friday with my Port Aransas friend, Nancy, comparing stories about our annoying pocket gophers that dig tunnels and leave considerable heaps of sand all about. The heaps from these busy below-ground critters are visible all over the island, usually leaving amusing dotted lines across the landscape as they make their way using a tunnel-tunnel-surface-tunnel-tunnel-surface method.

There's nothing like a beautiful garden of treasured plants interrupted by the sudden appearance of a mound of sand, followed the next day by two more mounds, and then two days later with six more.

Now visualize this scene: Ray and I are enjoying a relaxing weekend session of working on the gentle downward slope of the front yard. I'm gathering dead branches from native plants that have completed their life cycle and he's watering the thirsty plants using a 3-foot watering wand that extends his reach. As I take a step, my foot surprises me by dropping four inches into the sand and collapsing a gopher tunnel. S#|+! Another tunnel means more heaps will soon be coming. I look down and realize the horizontal tunnel didn't anticipate the downward slope and I can clearly see straight into it. Suddenly, I see movement, and realize I just glimpsed the gopher as it moved away!

I shout the excitement to Ray how it was so close I could have touched it. But feeling there's nothing I can do other that go for poison, I just stomp the tunnel to make an unwelcoming environment for our unwanted friend. 

And then, just a couple of feet to my left, I notice where yet another tunnel is clearly open, and there in the opening is the small white face of a gopher looking straight at me! Without hesitation this time, I reach in and pull the little thing out!

What did I expect? It bit me! But I was wearing thick protective gloves, so pain with no harm meant I just dropped it on the ground and moved between it and its hole so it couldn't go back in.

This is NOT our gopher!
It somewhat resembles the one we met.

It was quite small for a gopher, no more than six inches long, and white -- white! -- not brown (like those in my research or one I once glimpsed in the back yard from a distance), and had several patches of gray to light brown over its back and underside. And it was very aggressive, lunging at me! Still feeling the significant pain from the bite, I wasn't going to try to stop it with my foot, and that's when Ray began squirting it with the jet spray from the watering wand.

No reaction. It kept coming.

Not willing to let a threat of any size hurt his spouse, Ray banged the little critter with the watering wand, which knocked it over and stopped its advance. It looked so startled and pathetic that I couldn't let him hurt it, so, using my experience from pulling armadillos out of their holes, I picked it up by its tail and carried it across the street, it wiggling but unable to bend and bite me again. I didn't want it in my yard, so relocating it seemed logical, so I tossed it as gently as I could into the thick, tall grasses on the other side of the road. It was the best solution for all that I could think of in the heat of the moment.

Then came the victory dance! I was so excited to have actually taken action against a considerable nuisance, actually pulled it out of the ground, experienced holding a wild animal in my hand, and felt successful that I'd taken immediate action in a situation presented to me to even slightly correct a problem, even if it returns.

When I say victory dance, I mean that literally, accompanied by several minutes of prolonged chanting and yelping, which I'm sure made my native american ancestors proud, if not for my style, then for my instinctive need to celebrate.

Then came the research. How could a gopher be white? None of the sites I found mentioned a white color other than some on the underside or perhaps a spot on the chest. There seems to be a range of documented colors from light brown to golden to very dark, but no mention I found of full-body white with patches or spots. I did find the statement that their color tends to match the color of the soil around their burrows, so -- white sand, white gopher? But spots?

We had a possum in Austin whose dark spots we could see as it climbed across the overhead umbrella of branches, but that was its skin color showing through its thin hair. Perhaps our white gopher's hair was so thin that its spotted skin was showing through.

Then I came across a reference to an albino pocket gopher, and a search for that term found -- boom -- many stories complete with photos that matched our little friend, though most noticeably larger. But wait. This site states that spotted and albino individuals are fairly common with Plains pocket gophers, so I'm leaning toward ours having been a juvenile, not yet fully-haired albino or leucistic of some unconfirmed species. That's my position until someone tells us otherwise. 

What's your theory?