Dirt Tubes

Have you ever been driving down a back road during the spring and seen tubes of dirt meandering along a ditch? These tubes are created by northern pocket gophers. Pocket gophers are small mammals that live mostly underground and are seldom spotted outside of their tunnels. They create dirt tubes when they are excavating tunnels in the winter and pushing the dirt up into tunnels in the snow. In the spring, right after the snow melts, you can see these dirt tubes in ditches and fields.