On supporting science journalism
If you're enjoying this article, consider supporting our award-winning journalism by subscribing. By purchasing a subscription you are helping to ensure the future of impactful stories about the discoveries and ideas shaping our world today.
A correspondent writing from Stockton, Cal, informs us that ground squirrels are so numerous in that region that they are a perfect pest to the farmers, as they destroy a very large portion of their crops As much as $100,000 are expended annually in California in purchasing strychnine, arsenic, and phosphorus, to destroy them, but these poisons seem to produce no useful result in diminishing their numbers Our correspondent, however, has, we think, hit upon a plan, which, when he carries it out, will put them to route most effectually He proposes to get a steam boiler of about fourhorse power, mount it on a wagon, draw it out to the fields, get up steam, and conduet it into their holes by a pipe, and thus steam the " varmints * in their dens These squirrels live in what are called "town ;" their holes are very numerous, and in clusters, and the passages underneath are all connected By taking the steam pipe, therefore, and inserting it in a hole, then closing all the others in the vicinity, and letting on the steam, a whole community will thus be steamed at one operation When this is accomplished, he will proceed to the next township, and extinguish its subterranean inhabitants in the same manner, and so on until the whole of squirreldom in that region is subdued by the allconquering power of steam
