Hole Lotta Lovin'... (hating soon to follow)

Week before last--two days before we left for Lake Tahoe, to be precise--I was scoping out the backyard patch and refilling our birdfeeders when I made a bizarre and head-scratching discovery. Right below one of our feeders was a hole. A big hole. About 6ish inches in diameter, and rather professional looking. It was immediately clear to me that whatever dug this hole was setting up shop and meant business.

I think what threw me off at first was its close proximity to the birdfeeder. I puzzled to Nick, "Could it be a snake? Maybe it wants to eat the birds?" Then the instantaneous proceeding thought tore about of my mouth with audible fear: "Do you think whatever it is will eat our dogs?" I imagined some viciously swift and cunning animal erupting out of that hole with rows of sharp fangs and an unquenchable desire to constrict itself around a small and unsuspecting surly chihuahua while he was taking a sleepy morning-time leak on one of my sunflowers. It is possible, oh yes, that I watched way too much Wild Kingdom as a child.

What did we do next? We promptly ignored it because, Hey! We were leaving on a jet plane in less than 48 hours, and we still had a lot of procrastinating to do before we started packing.

Fast forward. We're back home from vacation, and I'm out in the back patch quietly cursing at my top heavy sunflowers who selfishly decided to bloom during our departure and deprive us of their lovely unfurling. I quickly remembered our odd little mystery hole, and upon checking it out I discovered that while it still is odd and mysterious, it is no longer little: I gasped and showed this to Nick, who, driven by the typical male-ish impulse to "fix' things, rapidly quipped, "I'm filling it in." In the time it took him to crack out the shovel and start scooping up dirt, I was completely overcome by guilt.

Rhianna: "I think this is a bad idea. We don't even know what it is."

Nick: "That's why we need to fill it in. It could hurt the dogs, Rhianna."

R: "I don't know. What if it suffocates down there? What if it has babies?"

N: "It doesn't matter." [continues shoveling in dirt]

R: It could be a rabbit! Could you do that to a bunny rabbit?" [quickly recalls seeing the movie Cujo as a child in which a dog chases a rabid rabbit into a hole, gets bit, contracts rabies, kills people in bloody ways, and forces me to promise myself I'll never own a Saint Bernard. Quickly scratches the the don't-kill-a-poor-bunny approach.]

Enter L., our neighbor. Wearing his favorite tie-dye shirt. Still lives at home with his elderly mother, more likely as her caregiver, but since we've not seen her in a while, we're assuming something more of a Norman Bates scenario. We've seen L. do Tai Chi in his backyard wearing nothing but a speedo. He's a nice guy, but terribly aloof, and to Nick's overwhelming frustration, is a careless lawn mower who shoots his grass clippings onto our car.

L: "Did you meet your new friend yet?"

R&N: "Wha?"

L: "Your groundhog. I've been seeing him every day. One day I saw him come right out of your garden."

R&N: Blink.

Blink blink.

Congratulations, Brave New Gardeners. IT'S A GROUNDHOG.

Once L. disappeared, I scolded Nick: "You just filled in a groundhog's hole! You're going to kill it! Dig that dirt back out now!"

And, like a good husband, he begrudgingly did so.

I remember reading in some of my gardening/farming narrative books about pesky, persistent and super destructive groundhogs. I remember chuckling quietly and with relief to myself that I wouldn't have to deal with such problems because I live in a city, have a small city suburban lot, and have never seen any wildlife in our yard outside of our neighborhood birds, one elderly confused possum, and the occasional lizard. What an idiot.

It was a Field of Dreams Moment. We built it, and the groundhog came. And set up permanent digs. Her hole (for some reason, I'm convinced it's a she) is such an expertly round hole. I imagined her earthy home to be a cross between Rabbit's (from Winnie the Pooh) and Bilbo Baggins'. For a moment I like her and feel a little honored that she thinks our garden is good enough to recklessly plunder. I name her Lonely Woodchuck Charlotte Charles, a.k.a. Chuck, shaking my fist at whoever thought it was a good idea to cancel Pushing Daisies.

Oh. But the dogs. What if she breaks all Crouching Tiger Hidden Dragon on my dogs? What if my Westie, who is afflicted with Little Dog Syndrome, doesn't realize he's no match for this lady woodchuck? We've already made our veterinarian plenty rich.

In other books I'd previously read, like The $64 Tomato and This Organic Life: Confessions of a Suburban Homesteader, the authors candidly account the measures they took to rid their gardens of varmints. Joan Dye Gussow (in This Organic Life) even resorted once to drowning an animal, which freaked me out into a sleepless night when I read that chapter. She's a pretty amazing woman, and I am not made of the stuff that is required for that level of extermination. I'm so chickenshit about this that I'm tempted to just leave little tomatoes outside of Chuck's hole so that she never has to come out. Maybe she'll eat herself into such largess that she can only join the outside world if someone removes a wall from her house.

I checked out the internet to see what other gardening sites had to say about groundhog infestation.The Humane Society discussed humanely trapping the animal and relocating her, noting that the downside to this is that this leaves her burrow ripe for the taking, probably by some gutter punk squatter groundhogs that I'll unyieldingly loathe. Also, she could get stuck in the trap in the hottest heat of the day while we're at work and could die from heat exposure (which is what happened in Bill Alexander's $64 Tomato adventure). Rhianna's version of groundhog relocation looks more like this: I also checked to see what Mother Earth News had to say on the matter, and it was here that I found such advice as "Don't waste the meat!" and encouragement to employ my 2nd amendment right to put a cap in Chuck's ass. I don't own a gun, and I could only resort to violence towards this animal if she came out of her burrow looking like this:
I did discover a few non-violent, non-trap suggestions. (Another downside for the trap-and-relocate option is that she could have babies down in the burrow, and relocating her without them would mean their certain demise. Like I said, I'm just not composed of the steely-ness required to commit to that tactic.) One noted that old clumped kitty litter dumped in the entrance to her hole would freak her out and cause her to see shelter elsewhere, or at least abandon that entrance to her burrow (she could have 4 or more entrances). We have 4 indoor feline pooping machines, so this seems like a rather sustainable win-win-win tactic.

I also read on another blog somewhere about a guy who repeatedly urinated directly into the groundhog hole, and this supposedly sent the chuck scampering away never to return. I turned to Nick with total seriousness, "Your mission, should you choose to accept it, is to pee in that groundhog hole." We're going for the cat crap approach right now.

Nick dropping a bag of kitty dung bombs on Charlotte's doorstep:As soon as he started pouring that stinkpile into the burrow entrance, I swear I heard little confused chirpings coming from the hole. I took off running. Nick shot me an dismissive expression, asked me what the hell I was doing, and told me it was probably just a bird. I doubt it.

A few days have passed since we left poop on the groundhog's front porch. The poop looks more settled, like someone has been trampling over it with her undeterred fat furry ass. Nick says he just pushed the little clumps further into the burrow with the shovel. I doubt it.

Yesterday I found a bell pepper outside of the burrow entrance. I have no idea what that means, but I'm pretty sure she's mocking us. Girl better cut the taunting and watch out. We've got some #1 and we're not afraid to use it.