The northern pocket gopher is one of the most frequently recorded mammals in South Dakota, and its reports span the state from Harding County in the far northwest to Charles Mix on the Missouri River. Brown County leads the list, with Pennington and Lawrence in the Black Hills close behind. A gopher lives almost entirely underground, so most of these records began as mounds of fresh dirt rather than a glimpse of the animal itself.
Reports arrive in every month but swell from June through August. Some of that is real, since gophers push up the most soil while they’re feeding and raising young in the warm months, and some is simply that summer is when people walk the grasslands and notice the diggings. Either way, a tally of mounds is a record of activity, not a census.
NatureServe ranks the gopher S5, secure in South Dakota, and it’s easy to see why. It works any deep, workable soil from prairie to mountain meadow, and its digging moves and aerates ground on a scale few other mammals match. From the Missouri breaks at Oahe and Sharpe up into the Hills, its signature is written across the landscape in fresh earth.
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