Last night I went out the back door and there in the yard was a groundhog. It looked at me for a minute and then sprinted toward the front. But by the time I got to the front yard, it had disappeared.
"Hm," I thought to myself. "It did not have time to disappear to anywhere that is not on my property. That's not ideal."
We've had more rain than usual this summer, and the weeds on the west side of the house got aggressive.There's a bed of tiger lilies under the dining room window where I always have to battle against a particularly vigorous weed that likes to grow up tall, and the spirea bush was sheltering a profusion of unwelcome new growth. Years ago we used to watch a fat groundhog wedge himself in and out of the small opening under a neighbor's porch, and I wondered if this one might have decided to shoehorn himself into new digs on this side of the street, coming and going discreetly under the overgrowth.
I started weeding under the spirea bush and worked my way out. Twenty minutes in, the answer appeared: a sizable burrow, right next to the foundation, sloping downward into the darkness under the lilies.
"...oh," I thought to myself. "That's not my favorite discovery."
The extent of the garden entropy has felt a little overwhelming this weekend. Yesterday I knew it was time to come inside when I started to think longingly about paving the whole yard. Today I thought it might be cathartic to howl, but instead I emitted only a small unhappy noise and started thinking about options.
Jamie Gladly, Reluctant Groundhog Landlady, was not certain about how to begin eviction proceedings. Rent a humane trap? And then drive its inhabitant far away to release it? This plan seemed even less attractive once Stella speculated that there might be a litter of pups (kittens? groundhoglets? miniature demons of destruction?) down there as well.
We have had a contract with an exterminator since the upsetting Mice in the Walls Incident, so I suppose I will give them a call. Let's hope the anti-rat perimeter I talked about in that old post is more effective than my failed anti-large-rodent perimeter.
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