Gophertopia

Okay, look: I know that gophers and ground squirrels are technically different rodents. (They’re even classified in separate families; pocket gophers belong to Geomyidae while ground squirrels belong to Scuridae. Just thought you might want to know.) However, most people get the two confused, and “gopher” becomes synonymous with “ground squirrel”.

When I was younger and living in Alberta, there were many, many ground squirrels, and my family and I used to call their hole-pocked living grounds gophertopias. We thought it was a quite clever name for the rodents’ domains, and I still think it’s clever, even if our use of “gopher” is technically incorrect. I’m sorry, I’m just a nitpicker for the details.

On the way back from the Vancouver road trip with my dad, we made a pit stop at a resort with amenities and an outdoor area with picnic tables, and I discovered that I was yet again in the midst of many, many ground squirrels like what I happened upon at Barkerville. But unlike those ground squirrels, these ones were tame. Like, touch-friendly tame.

Yes, I pet the ground squirrels. Honestly, who wouldn’t? They were so irresistibly charming and charismatic, unabashedly looking for food, no doubt used to being hand-fed from tourists and anyone susceptible to their cuteness.

Their curiosity and lack of fear made for some quite good photos, too, ones that I’m excited to share. The ground squirrels’ trust combined with my camera’s zoom lens made for an enchanting photography experience.