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Y'all just help yourselves…

There was a once-upon-a-time when the chickens and groundhogs were wary of each other. Now they have daily grazing parties in the orchard.

I wish I had some idea what my groundhog population is. I’m pretty sure I have two separate families. The fence that keeps the chickens out of the garden also keeps the groundhogs out. Mostly the groundhogs seem to want my grass, and I’m fine with that. So I leave them alone. It’s the voles that do most of the damage, but the voles feed the foxes.

It makes me think of George Bernard Shaw’s preface to his play about Joan of Arc:

The saints and prophets, though they may be accidentally in this or that official position or rank, are always really self-selected, like Joan. And since neither Church nor State, by the secular necessities of its constitution, can guarantee even the recognition of such self-chosen missions, there is nothing for us but to make it a point of honor to privilege heresy to the last bearable degree on the simple ground that all evolution in thought and conduct must at first appear as heresy and misconduct. In short, though all society is founded on intolerance, all improvement is founded on tolerance, or the recognition of the fact that the law of evolution is Ibsen’s law of change.

And so it is, I think, with Mother Nature, and groundhogs, and voles. I try to tolerate them to the last bearable degree.

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