I had to chuckle the other day. I was returning from the Salem Presbyterian Cemetery located northeast of Gothenburg and a 13-lined ground squirrel ran across the road. Had Dean, my father-in-law, been driving he would have swerved to try and kill the little rodent. Why? He hated 13-lined ground squirrels.

Thirteen-liners are one of the 39 or so rodents in Nebraska and one of six kinds of ground squirrels. They are creatures of the prairie and their range covers the Great Plains east to the Great Lakes. They are cute little things, and yes, they do have 13 stripes down their back. They are about a foot long and half of that is tail. They live underground digging burrows, but unlike prairie dogs and gophers, there isn’t a mound of dirt around the opening. The “liners” actually scatter the dirt thus hiding the opening to their burrows.

The scientific name for the little rat is Spermophilus tridecemlineatus which translates into the seed loving rat with 13 lines. They are well-named as they live mostly on plant seeds, however, they do love a juicy grasshopper or earthworm now and then. They were named by Samuel L. Mitchill, a physician, congressman, senator, and chemistry professor at Columbia University. In his retirement, he turned to natural history and identified and named 34 different animals, mostly fish as well as the ground squirrel.

One negative aspect of the “liners” is they have been known to follow a row of freshly planted corn, eating the seeds! When the field emerges there will be blank places in the row where the seeds were eaten, but that wasn’t why Dean hated them.

A small rodent is prime food for any number of predators. All kinds of snakes love 13-lined ground squirrels. They are a delicacy to a fox or weasel, and virtually every hawk and owl that lives around Gothenburg feeds upon them. If you go out to the Salem Cemetery you will see the holes of 13-lined ground squirrels and that is where I came to understand my father-in-law’s dislike for them. It’s not what they do; it is what happens to them. They get eaten by badgers.

The badger will dig them out of their burrows. The ground squirrel will have one main burrow and then a few “escape” burrows so the badger will end up digging a bunch of holes looking for the one that has the rat. Dean hated the holes that the badgers dug in the road, the field, and his yard and he blamed the “liners” for it all. In Dean’s mind, if there were no 13-lined ground squirrels, there would be no badger holes in the fields.

Rick from Farnam would agree. He even developed what he calls his “critter getter”. This is a trap you set out in an area where you want to get rid of badgers. The trap doesn’t trap badgers; it traps 13-lined ground squirrels. The idea is that once you rid the area of the little squirrels, the badgers, having nothing to eat, will leave as well. It works much better than Dean swerving to try and run the little rodents over!