Gopher-Trapping Pickup Truck

Gopher-Trapping Pickup Truck MISCELLANEOUS EQUIPMENT Pest Animals 29-6-26 Don Selby is on a crusade to help farmers take back hay fields from pocket gophers whose tunnels and dirt mounds cause untold millions of dollars of damage to crops and equipment each year. To attack the gophers in the area around his home near Vimy, Alberta, the 75-year-old Selby built a "trapping truck" that has helped him remove close to 10,000 pocket gophers over the past few years from farms in his area. Selby bought a 1980 Datsun for $50 and modified it so he can quickly zip around fields to set and check traps. He has a bird's eye view of the fields he's working from his perch behind and above the cab. He removed the passenger seat in the King Cab to make room for extra supplies such as warmer clothing. His traps, marker flags, and miscellaneous supplies are stored in the truck box. He focuses his gopher control efforts on two-week periods of about 20 hrs. per week - first thing in the spring before the hay starts to grow, at end of June following the first cut of hay, and then again in the fall, after the last cut. When he first started trapping Selby had the help of his young grandkids who drove the truck for him between gopher colonies while he stood in the box. However, as the kids got older, they eventually lost interest and didn't want to drive for him anymore. "I almost quit trapping because it was hard to see the mole hills while driving the truck, making the job a lot harder to do," he says. But two years ago, Selby decided to make his rig a lot handier by extending the steering wheel and other controls out through the roof. He left the truck's original steering wheel intact, but extended it with a universal joint and shaft that runs up to a steering column off a 1966 Ford pickup. Next, he removed the back window and ran plastic weed trimmer line from the accelerator pedal up through pulleys to a gas pedal that works like a teeter totter. Pressing on the pedal accelerates the truck normally. Since the truck has an automatic transmission with a floor shift, Selby duct taped the locking mechanism permanently shut, so he can shift at random into any gear he wants, thanks to two pieces of strap iron that extend the gear shifter up to the top of the truck. A 1/2-in. dia. metal pipe bolts to the brake pedal and runs up to a pedal on the operator platform so Selby can brake normally. The end result of all the modifications is that once he has started the truck, Selby can drive normally while standing on the lookout deck. "It wouldn't win any safety awards," he admits, but Selby drives his rig carefully and slowly through the fields. "I should have a kill switch for the ignition because that would be good to have if I was ever in a bind, but other than that, this outfit has everything I need," he says. He built wooden steps inside the truck box to make it easier to climb up on the platform. Since the truck isn't road-worthy, he made a tow bar on front with scrap metal and part of an old grader blade. He uses this to avoid getting a ticket when moving the unit from job to job. When not in use, it's held out of the way with a bungy cord, which hooks to the center of the hood. Selby marks the traps he has set with flags he makes from wire clothes hangers bent straight with bright-colored material taped to the top. Selby admits that, when he first started trapping, he didn't know what he was getting into. It's much more challenging than he thought it would be. Selby says the only way to be successful is to keep expanding the trapping area to prevent new gophers from moving in. Once he realized what he was up against, he took hold of the challenge and tried turning it into a business, but now it's more of a hobby, he says. Initially, he started out doing it on foot, and then on a quad, before graduating to the trapping truck. When he started out trapping, Selby knew he would need a large number of traps. Instead of buying traps that sold for $10 to $15 apiece, he built 150 of his own traps by using components from in

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