The bride as usual has been busy in the yard all spring and early summer planting in her garden. Every year it seems to be more beautiful than the last. For some reason more so than in the past, varmints have beset us and like to treat her garden like the dessert table. Just the other day I happened to look out the window and see a chipmunk sitting on the top of a lily with half the flower in his little hands as he was chomping away. We are acquainted with this little fellow primarily by finally concluding that the hundreds of little holes dug in the flowerbeds and the rest of the yard are as a result of his industriousness. Although annoying, the holes don’t seem to be doing much damage.
The real appetite resides in a rather handsome and pudgy woodchuck that lives down behind our house or more likely behind Tim’s house next door. We see him now and then cautiously poking his nose out of the high weeds and then carefully setting up shop in the grass. Although I have never actually seen this fellow poach the garden we can deduce by the height at which he has tasted things that he is our perpetrator.
What to do? Carole had taken matters into her own hands and borrowed a tender trap from a co-worker. It was decided over the weekend that I would bait and set the trap and capture this renegade. I couldn’t do it. The central question becomes what to do with our little neighbor once we have him in custody? On reflection it seemed illegal or at least cruel to relocate our friend to a new address. The other alternative of perhaps doing away with him once he was caught was not even broached.
The subject s was thrown open for further discussion the other night and as I guessed the planters were all on the same page. Our Saturday night dinner companions who have been vexed with the same problem voiced their preference. Apparently the Department of Agriculture somewhere makes available cyanide pellets that can be dropped into woodchuck holes to gas them. Another alternative was the oily smoky rag in the hole followed by a trash barrel cover pressed tightly over it.
The radio gardener said lead was the only solution. I was wondering what lead would do when he finished the sentence by saying lead “right between the eyes”. Yikes! Frontier justice for a little friend? Carole was a little surprised at my reluctance and reminded me of the expense and the reason for gardening. She even went so far as to remind me “I might have a different opinion if he was dining on the girls”. A reference to the name I had given a large planting of Impatiens I have under taken this year. This set me back a bit but so far has not spurred me to action.
I certainly might think differently were I a 17th century inhabitant of this property and he was poaching vegetables, which might be used for a meal during the darkness of February. Indeed if that were the case he might have been caught long ago and ended up in a tasty Saturday night stew!
Living in our yard is not quite the suburban paradise one might think. Sure its heaven on earth when you consider the cuisine available to an herbivore but that’s when you consider the cuisine only. He has a bit of a gauntlet to run before he dines. So far he has eluded the neighborhood fox, coyote and any number of very large red tail hawks that constantly fly overhead. It would seem that it would be unfair to complicate the little guy’s life by adding me to his worries. So back in the box that damn trap went. Maybe I will start throwing a little food closer to his hide out to cut down some of his risk.
Yes, the reason for a garden is the beauty that it provides but there is also beauty in the other elements in nature of which he is one.
