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We've been counting over 200 each of the days
that we've counted in just this one acre plot.
I'm Mark Nelson, I'm USU extension agent here
in Beaver County.
We are out on the Milford flat today
around the corners of some of the Alfalfa Fields.
We're having a real problem with the Townsend ground squirrel.
As you can see by some of the video that's been taken,
the squirrels are coming in and eating a lot of the alfalfa
hay for these farmers and costing them
thousands of dollars in lost profits from selling their crop
and also they're spending thousands
of dollars trying to come up with some different ways
to control these.
I was able to get a grant to come in and do some research.
There's a lot of gopher baits that
are available that the farmers can use.
But because they go down the holes,
they will kill the pocket gophers.
But for the ground squirrels, they feed up above.
And we have to try to find some baits that they will eat.
There's very few license here in the state of Utah.
Zinc phosphide is licensed, but they don't like it
once the alfalfa greens up.
We have a couple of pellets debates
that we've found that are being used in California and some
of the other places, and we're testing them here
to see what will happen.
We have put together an acre plot here.
And for the last three days, we've
come and counted how many ground squirrels
appear each day in these plots.
Today, we're coming and we're filling in the holes
and then we'll come back tomorrow
and we will come in and count those holes.
And that's just one more method of counting
how many squirrels there are.
We're going to go ahead and treat
the area in these white bait stations
that we've made out of PVC pipe.
We're going to put the bait in there, leave them for a week,
and then we'll come back and count the squirrels again,
and we'll come back and fill all the holes again and then
count how many new ones.
And hopefully, the numbers will go down
and we'll find out which of these baits
are most successful.
This field is made up of two different farmers.
And the one over here on my right
had a terrible squirrel infestation last year.
So he came in and plowed up his alfalfa field
earlier than he usually would.
And he's going to plant corn this year
because the squirrels don't like corn as much.
And this costs him quite a bit of money
because every time you have to go and run
the equipment across the field, it costs some money
and it costs--
they say that it costs the price that you
would get for your hay for two years just
to come in and put it in a new alfalfa crop.
So that's one of the things if we can do these trials
and figure out some ways to control these squirrels,
so they don't have to plow their field so often.
It'll save them a lot of money.
We're trying lots of different ways
to control ground squirrels.
And there are many different methods, but most of them
aren't too easy and are quite expensive.
We had a presenter come up from California
and talk about a study he'd done using this perch machine.
It's a carbon monoxide machine, and they're quite expensive.
But you can go and treat four different holes
all at the same time.
And the nice thing with these is you go treat four holes
at different time, costs about $10,000,
but they feel like they're getting pretty good control.
And it's one of those things where it's not
a dangerous gas like some of the zinc phosphide gases
that we're using, or the gas crunch does
and it does seem to be a pretty effective method of control.
This is another one of the research plots
we're going to do, where we're going
to try another one of the squirrel baits that's
a pellet form and see if it works out better.
One reason that this area has been infested
so badly is because of the neighbor here.
This is an area that's owned by a family out of California that
don't do anything with it.
And they just leave it in the squirrels run back and forth,
back and forth.
And the farmer here will always have a real problem
with the squirrels because they're
digging their holes over there.
If those guys would come in there
and try to control their squirrels,
it would really help the farmer over here.
But because this is infested so bad,
it does make a nice research plot for us.
So we're going ahead and covering the holes,
and then we'll come in tomorrow and see
how many live holes we had.
And then in two days, we'll come in
and put the bait in these different bait stations.
People always ask me, why do we have so many-- more
squirrel problems now than we used to have.
And there are several different reasons for that.
One of those is that we don't flood irrigate anymore.
Now, we're very efficient.
We use the center pivots.
We only put on a little bit of water
or this area 20 years ago used to--
or 30 years ago used to all be flood
irrigated and it would kill a lot of them.
The other thing is when the first farmers came
into this area, they used to plant a lot of trees
and a lot of wind breaks.
And now, those trees are getting old and dying
and the farmers aren't replanting them.
So it makes it--
we have a lot of hawks and eagles
that will come and help control the squirrels,
but there is places for them to perch,
so we don't have as many them.
So we've come in and tried to set up a few artificial perches
to see if that will help bring the birds and more
of the natural controls into help control
the squirrel problem.
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