Smiling Pocket Gopher

by Jurgen Lorenzen

Title

Smiling Pocket Gopher

Artist

Jurgen Lorenzen

Medium

Photograph - Photography

Description

This Botta's pocket gopher poked his head out of his burrow and smiled at me at Catalina State Park near Tucson, Arizona.
Botta's pocket gopher is a pocket gopher native to western North America. It is also known in some sources as valley pocket gopher, particularly in California. Both the specific and common names of this species honor Paul-Émile Botta, a naturalist and archaeologist who collected mammals in California in 1827 and 1828.
Botta's pocket gopher is highly adaptable, burrowing into a very diverse array of soils from loose sands to tightly packed clays, and from arid deserts to high altitude meadows. They are able to tolerate such a wide range of soils in part because they dig primarily with their teeth, which are larger and with a thicker layer of enamel than in claw-digging gophers. In comparison, gophers digging with their claws are generally only able to dig in softer soils, because their claws wear down more quickly than teeth do in harder materials.

Uploaded

February 25th, 2021

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