Friday, August 16, 2002
You Ain’t Nothin’ But A Groundhog
Our garden is planned to welcome wildlife, with spires of nectar-filled buddleia for butterflies and our untrimmed hedgerows harbour two pairs of cardinals. Soon, the sunflowers will ripen into bronze dinner plates of oil-rich seeds for the goldfinches.
Still, our hospitality yields mixed results. As soon as we erected a wooden bat house, the resident squirrels gnawed it into toothpicks. But local bats come by and keep us skeeter-free any way. We were apprehensive when raccoons moved into our hollow tree, a clan of bright-eyed bandits evicted by the neighbour from his garage. But the raccoons’ antics kept us glued to our black and white Tree Vee for a couple of dusks, and then they moved on.
In June, I noticed a large hole chewed in the wooden trellis around our deck, that’s supposed to keep animals out from under. By July, there were a couple more holes, and the leaves had been stripped off some plants in the front yard. “Oh well,” we thought, “we have plenty of lilies. It’s probably rabbits.”
When I found a treasured purple coneflower had been decapitated, I prescribed aversion therapy for our mystery guest, and dowsed the rest of the plant in vintage tabasco sauce. The next day, the coneflower had shriveled up, scalded by the hot sauce, and somebody had clearly just moved on to the next plant delicacy in the flowerbed. Then, I spotted a groundhog waddling across the lawn, its heavy but lithe hips swinging like an ageing Elvis in a fur coat.
I dubbed the groundhog, “Lardbutt,” on account of its figure and what I took to be the indolent nature its physique expressed. But I’ve learned that under that mild-mannered vegetarian exterior lurks a prodigy of muscular will.
When the next hole appeared in the vegetable garden, on the other side of the garage, we blocked its mouth with a hunk of old concrete. The next morning, the concrete had been casually tossed aside. We tried a stone the weight of a young groundhog - same result. Contemplating the huge mound of dirt displaced by Lardbutt’s excavations, it dawned on me that this hole was probably connected to the burrow under the deck, a good thirty feet away. I suddenly imagined the whole deck tilting and sliding into the underworld, followed by the garage.
It was time to move our tenant out. The nice lady at the Humane Society said that they did rent live-traps, but not until the temperature fell below eighty: a trapped animal might die of heatstroke. The bean crop vanished as we waited for the heat wave to break.
Meanwhile, we tried deterrence. We stuffed rags soaked in ammonia in the hole by the deck. The rags promptly vanished. But Lardbutt didn’t. Next, for a modest sum, we bought some “natural repellent” from LegUp enterprises - a bottle of red fox urine. The elegant idea is to use the marker scent of a natural predator to deter varmints. So we duly decanted the fox wee into tiny phials suspended at groundhog nose level. A musky odour enveloped the deck as we drank our morning coffee. The car started to smell funny. Stray dogs frequented our deck, in search of the maddening invisible red fox. Lardbutt, however, was completely unperturbed, perhaps too citified to recognise a natural predator when he smelled one.
Finally, the weather broke and, for fifteen bucks, I rented a large wire mesh box, with a simple trip mechanism. Triumphantly, I brought the live-trap home and baited it. Within three hours, I looked out of the kitchen window to see Lardbutt in the trap, munching placidly on watermelon and PB.
We bundled the live-trap into the car trunk, and drove straight down Ironwood. When we opened the trap door, our visitor paused to lick up the last traces of peanut butter. The words, “Thank, thank you very much,” hung in the air, and Lardbutt galloped off into the woods.