Groundhog, Be Gone!

If a woodchuck could chuck wood, why would he chuck it in my garden?

Okay, maybe he’s just a groundhog.* In which case, I don’t have a ton of space in my yard, so there ain’t no extra ground for him to be hogging! It’s small but it’s all mine, and I want him to go away.

Yes, a few weeks ago, a groundhog took up residence in my garden; specifically, he decided that my back deck was a great real estate find and we began to see him slink out regularly from underneath a little dip below a deck that sits just eight or so inches off the ground.

I imagine he built himself a nice little network of tunnels and routes under our yard. The people we bought the house from planted these beautiful perennials and flowering plants, and so it appears we have a lush smorgasbord of eats for a whole host of critters. Groundhog nirvana!

It’s to be expected, in this part of Fairfield County, though, no? Not even counting South Dakotan Mountain Lions, we have an abundance of wildlife with which we co-exist.

I once entertained my husband’s grandmother on her first visit to our house from France, describing (in my best, pieced-together Franglais) how we frequently see up to a dozen deer at one time pass by our kitchen window, since we live above a gully that’s a well-traveled deerpath. As if on cue, like I pushed the Disney, animatronic “send in the deer!” button, fourteen deer in single file walked across our vista.

When we first moved to Wilton, we’d drive around the winding, New England roads and each time we passed a ‘Deer Crossing’ sign my kids would yell, “Deer!” They learned that got old, fast.

We’ve heard of random black bear sightings. We’ve seen coyotes. We’ve seen the “Dog Missing, Reward” signs, too. Sniff.

But since (sadly) losing Natasha, our Jack Russell Terrier in February (to old age, not the circle of life, thank you very much) we’ve noticed a sharp uptick in our own personal Wild Kingdom. We suddenly can’t maintain our Hostas, a deer delicacy, the way we used to. And then Woody the woodchuck appeared and squatted under our deck without volunteering to pay his share of Wilton’s higher real estate tax rate.

The kids liked to try to spot him. Soon, it became pretty easy, as he grew comfortable wiggling out of his hole and crossing our yard to the plant beds just a few feet away. He got so cocky even a sharp rap on the back windows wouldn’t necessarily get him scurrying back to his hole.

Given that we’re still on a very conservative budget, there was no calling a professional in to take care of the situation for us. No Tony Soprano of the rodent-ridding underworld for us! Ok, truth be told, since I’m more like Eva Gabor in Green Acres than I am Laura Ingalls Wilder, I did, at the least, call someone.

I spoke to a wildlife removal service to find out how much it would cost. After hearing it would run $175 for the humane trap to be set, and $200 afterward for removing the animal, my husband and I looked at one another and thought, “Maybe having a groundhog in the backyard isn’t so bad!”

But the wildlife remover guy was actually a good guy. He talked me through what it would take to do it ourselves. Eva Gabor, watch out! He recommended we get a Havahart trap, and that we should fill it frequently with fresh veggies (“change the veggies often; what’s growing in your garden is always more fresh,” he said).

Wild trapper man also said that while it might take a while to trap the groundhog, once we had it trapped there were a couple things to consider. One, it was going to smell, so when we transported it to wherever we intended to release it, we’d likely want to place the trap into a bin so we wouldn’t stink up our trunk. The other thing was we should let the groundhog sit in the trap for a while and let it…do its business; this way it if we needed to trap other groundhogs, they’d be attracted to the scent that then covered the trap. Delightful!

We wound up finding a trap to rent from Keough’s Hardware for $12.00 a week. Let’s just pause to let that sink in. $12.00 a week. Take that, $375, booyah!

Trapper man had also recommended onion as a great lure for our furry friend. So we stocked the trap with onions, tomatoes and organic baby arugula (it’s what we had on hand, don’t judge). And we settled in for the night, prepared to heed the words of our expert trapper that it might take a while.

“He’s in! He’s in! We got the groundhog!” There are no better words to be woken to by a screaming five year old. Sure enough, the groundhog had wanted an onion-tomato-arugula salad for breakfast.

We’d done it. We’d captured the garden-eating, underground-squatting rodent by ourselves in just one night. And while he didn’t look as large close up in the cage as he did from up above out our kitchen window, we felt some sort of satisfaction that we’d claimed back our space for ourselves.

We loaded the caged critter into the trunk of my husband’s car (did you think I'd use mine?) and we lined it with plastic bags, tempting fate and opting not to put him in a bin (we figured he was already pretty frightened in the trunk). We drove him several miles away to a wooded forest preserve and let him go. He was, as the trapper had told us, more afraid of us than we were of him, and he scurried away as quickly as he could.

It was a moment of self-satisfaction and accomplishment that, while I imagine doesn’t yet qualify us for official hardy New Englander status, has moved us a half-inch closer to feeling like we can adapt to our surroundings. I’m not saying I’m going to go out and build my own stone wall, or learn how to can and jar food I grow myself, but I feel like we handled it as admirably as possible for former city-folk.

Now, who can I call about all that woodchuck poop in my backyard?

*Trust me, I know, a groundhog and a woodchuck are the same thing. I Googled it, and Wikipedia vouched for it, so it must be true.