Using Google Earth to find gophers....?

J

Jeff000

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I have seen a few comments about using Google Earth to find good places to find gophers. But umm how do you tell where they could be? A field looks like a field to me on there.
 
That sounds "incredible" to me, finding a gopher mound on google satellite maps. I'm not sure how you could tell a cow patty or bald patch from a gopher mound at the level of resolution I usually see. I can see atv trails easily, but not much finer than that. You're better off taking a drive around pasture land and asking farmers for advice and permission.
 
I think people meant more use it to find land that would be probable to having gophers so that actual scouting would be less random driving.

My question is how do you tell from google earth what land could have gophers?

Going out for a drive around Edmonton is a LOT of land. And I have NO idea where to even start.
 
If you are using google earth, what you would do is find a piece of property that actually has gophers on it and note where it is. You would use google Earth to find other pieces of land that look like the one that you saw gophers on. It is not perfect but from personal experience it does help narrow the band of land to search. A good example of this is how I looked for coyote hunting land. I hunt coyotes with a certain stand/geographical preference - so all I did was go through the steps above to narrow my search and then jump in the truck and go scouting. I tried just driving around and I can tell you right now that for me it was the biggest waste of fuel. It also didn't tell me who owned the property or if it was crown land - I could overlay a county map on the area I was looking at and figure out who I needed to speak to. It works well and saves money if you do it right...
 
If you have the PAY version of google earth then your resolutions are better. Also down in the US, their photos are 1000x better (more passes with the satellite) than what we can see here in Canada.
 
I use google earth all the time for locating land and pastures that hold gophers. Naturally one has to search country that is known to be gopher friendly. Google earth if in high resolution will allow you to spot dens that have been excavated by badgers... a true indication of gopher activity. Of coarse ground work has to be carried out as well.
 
drache said:
If you have the PAY version of google earth then your resolutions are better. Also down in the US, their photos are 1000x better (more passes with the satellite) than what we can see here in Canada.
Click to expand...

Read the fine print on the pay access stuff.

Not better resolution, for the cash, better access to marketing and demographics data as well as use of the materials.

The places that have the higher res are because they were photographed by air survey, from a lower altitude, not from more passes with a satellite. The imagery is a mix of satellite, synthesized, and air photo data, depending on where the picture is, and whether they have actually uploaded the data to the servers.

May be news to you (or not) as a dial up user (sucks! for GE) but most of BC was only just made available in color in the last 1-2 years. Until then, there were some areas that had been loaded up, some that were not. The 'not' areas got the synthesized treatment as you zoomed in. Still useful for getting the general lay of the land, but not so much for trying to figure out who was parked in your driveway the day the pictures were taken...

Cheers
Trev
 
Call me old school but there is nothing more productive then windshield time. Just like scouting fields or potholes for waterfowl hunting, nothing beats getting out on the land and finding hot areas. Once you find the field(s) you want to shoot/hunt, knock on doors, and line up the shoot. I also make sure to an up to date RM/section maps, phone book, and cell phone.
 
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