Into the Woods

My new neighbor’s new digs, just up the hill from my side porch

This evening I went out to the deck to dump some supper scraps in the compost bucket. I happened to look up the hill. I saw a groundhog sitting on a newly excavated pile of dirt. I got the camera and went to check it out. He’s made himself quite a nice new home there.

I give myself a score of 1 because, for now at least, I appear to have driven off the five-foot blacksnake that was getting into my chicken house looking for eggs. I didn’t hurt the snake (unless it got zapped by the fence charger after I threw Listerine in its face), but either my fighting back against it, or the rather expensive snake repellant that I put out, or both, seems to have persuaded it to move on.

All the other critters have won: The doe with her little Bambi who completely wiped out my garden beds last night, the swallow with the nest in the basement, the lizard on the porch roof that almost fell on my head when I was screwing down roofing, the wild turkeys, the rabbit (he’s quite welcome, but I’ve only seen him once); the hoppy toad on the front walkway (he’s welcome too), the pigeon that slept on my roof for a week or so before something got him (probably an owl), even the little green snake, which doesn’t scare me and which doesn’t eat eggs. I had seen the groundhog before, closer to the woods on the lower side of the house. Either he’s decided to move up the hill, or this is a groundhog family.