Not The Rabbit Wars

The war you are in is not always the war you think you are in.

I told all my friends and relatives, “The Rabbit Wars have begun.”

They knew what I meant. It was not exactly “news.” We’ve always had to share the garden with rabbits. That’s only fair. The trick is to not share all of everything. One summer, a cute bunny got into my well-fortified, fenced-in garden through a backdoor I couldn’t find. It wasn’t doing too much harm, beyond alarming the green beans. But with a tip of the hat to Ogden Nash:

The trouble with a
bunny, dag nabbit,
eventually
it becomes a rabbit.

So one afternoon, Keaton and I went up to the garden to do some weeding, and we accidentally interrupted the bunny while it was nibbling carrot fronds. A grand chase ensued.

Bunnies are taught from birth to never give away the backdoor. I can’t begin to imagine the penalty for breaking this rule, but it must be something horrific. Our bunny would bolt from one hiding place to another inside the garden, but avoid anything that would reveal its entrance way. With plenty of green bean bushes, trellised tomato hedges, and squash brambles to hide in, the bunny had all the advantages. Keaton, however, was equally persistent. Boys and bunnies are made for the chase.

Eventually, the bunny decided that it was tired of the game, and it made a dash for the corner of the garden, rules or no rules. It slipped under the fencing through a hidden passage, a passage carefully engineered and concealed by Rabbitdom down through the ages. Then it cotton-tailed it across the meadow and into the woods. With the backdoor revealed, it was a simple task to patch up the hole, sadly relegating the bunnies to the exterior of the garden.

For a while. Until the next time.

There is always a next time, and fair sharing with our rabbits requires annual fence failures, inspections, and renovations. So, a couple of weeks ago, I was not surprised to find the tops of the carrots missing in action.

“The Rabbit Wars have begun!” I told everyone.

It was really my own fault. I left the bridge down over the moat, metaphorically speaking.

You can put up all the fencing you want, but the garden gate remains a vulnerability. The number one defensive Achilles heel. Ask Peter Rabbit and Farmer Brown’s Boy, arguably the most famous literary pair to make this discovery. My solution is to place a board smack behind the gate door, sealing off the under-the-gate route from my marauding neighbors.

Sometimes, however, you need to get the wheelbarrow into the garden. Unless you want to lift the wheelbarrow over the guard-board – which kind of defeats the purpose of the wheelie aspect of the wheelbarrow – the board has to come out. And sometimes, then, it follows that you will forget to replace the board. As I did the other day.

The rabbit -- from long experience I imagined it was a rabbit -- the rabbit took this as an open invitation to dinner. The carrot tops, the lettuce, and the kale leaves were all sampled abundantly. To be honest, this seemed a little piggier than I expected from a rabbit. Maybe it was especially hungry. Well, never mind, there was a simple solution to this problem. I reinstalled the guard-board behind the gate and expected all to be well.

The next day I found the guard-board pushed down. The rabbit had squeezed under the gate, pushed the guard-board over, and proceeded on to its buffet. Well, never mind, there was a simple solution to this problem. I reinstalled the guard-board behind the gate and pounded two T-bar posts behind the guard-board.

The next day the gate reinforcements were still intact. Success! The moat had not been breached. Score one for the farmers. Except, there were other ways into the garden. More difficult, it must be admitted, but still, there were other ways. The rabbit had found a loose attachment in the chicken wire barrier surrounding the garden, a barrier that protects the castle from heathens trying to crawl under the major deer exclusion fencing. Yes, gardens must wear both belts and suspenders. A little excavation by the bunny and dinner was served.

Well, never mind, there was a simple solution to this problem. I just filled in the excavated dirt, replaced the damaged chicken wire segment, and covered it all up with large rocks. Like all gardens, the most abundant crop in mine is rocks.

The next day, the rabbit had started on the collards. Well, I guess that’s to be expected for a southern rabbit in the heart of Virginia. When I tried to find the new backdoor, I discovered that it was the same one I had patched the day before. The rabbit had tossed aside all the rocks, ripped open a hole in some of the rustier old chicken wire, and tunneled its way right back in.

I imagined an Arnold Schwarzenegger sized rabbit growling, “I’ll be back!”

This was beginning to seem very not normal.

We played our game of Dungeons and Dragons for several more days, during which time the rabbit’s appetite became more and more voracious. And then, it got to the broccoli.

I finally came to the realization that this was no rabbit. Better late than never. My trail camera confirmed it. I had been fighting a Rabbit War when, in reality, I had been in a Groundhog War all along.

The groundhog, Marmota monax, is also known as a “woodchuck.” I will refer to mine as a “groundhog” because they hate being called a groundhog.

For one thing that stupid Punxsutawney Phil, the “groundhog” for Groundhog’s Day, gives all woodchucks a bad name. Hoisted up by some weird human in an Abraham Lincoln top-hat, and docile as a guinea pig. What’s he on? Drugs? Spewing out made-up weather predictions. Six more weeks of winter, my ass. With global warming? He’s probably campaigning for a job in Trump’s emaciated National Weather Service.

They also hate to be called a “groundhog” because it just doesn’t have the same ring to it, the same cachet, as “woodchuck.”

Can you image the GEICO television commercial?

Somewhere deep in the Maine Woods. A luxury log cabin stands in the background. There is the smell of wood smoke. A grizzled lumberjack comes driving through the woods in his vintage pickup truck. It bears cosmetic touches of wear-and-tear. Ford authenticity.

He pulls to a a stop and jumps out of the truck, a look of frustration and anger on his face. This has happened before. He shouts:

LUMBERJACK: “Hey, you groundhogs! Stop hogging my grounds!”

See. Neither can I.

So I will call it a groundhog. It’s the principle of the thing.

Just to annoy it.

The reckoning that I was in a Groundhog War, not a Rabbit War, prompted a flurry of activity. Groundhogs can rip apart rusty chicken wire. They also prefer the cover of overgrown weeds and grasses.

There was, I had to admit, an overabundance of overgrown weeds along the back fence line of the garden. A hippopotamus could probably hide there without detection. There was also an overabundance of overly rusty chicken wire, celebrating its eighth, or tenth, or twentieth birthday? I don’t know.

So I rushed in and spent two days ripping out all the brush, weeds, and nascent Ailanthus trees. Hard, sweaty work. I covered all the old rusty chicken wire with a new layer of virgin chicken wire; if my groundhog is willing to chew through chicken wire, it was going to have to chew through two layers. The chicken wire is four feet wide, and three feet of it goes up the side of the deer exclusion fencing. The bottom foot is then bent 90 degrees and placed flat on the ground. This is supposed to be a surprise to the digging groundhog and trick it into thinking the wire extends all the way out to the next county. Give it up, Dude.

I hate chicken wire. The person, or persons, who invented chicken wire should be given the Nobel Prize in Engineering, while simultaneously being shot by a firing squad for creating an existential menace to society. It is perfectly designed for exactly the job it is supposed to do. It’s cheap. It will also velcro itself together in annoying designs, and scratch you viciously, continuously, everywhere on your person. Rusty chicken wire is especially adept at the latter. But, hey, when you are in a Groundhog War, that is the price you have to pay.

I also put up three lines of electric wire along the inside perimeter. The lines were hot. I discovered that by sheer accident.

Finally, it was all quiet on the Western front.

Peace didn’t last long.

My groundhog apparently had been to college. Maybe it had also been to the next county and knew that there wasn’t any chicken wire in the ground up there. In any case, it found the outside edge of my chicken wire and just dug under it. It finished off the lettuce and collards.

“Show me a 10-foot wall, and I’ll show you an 11-foot ladder.”
Show me an 8-foot garden fence, and I’ll show you a 20-inch groundhog.

Desperate times call for desperate measures. I went to my local farmers’ cooperative and plunked down a month’s salary for a live trap. One big enough to be a groundhog condominium. It was all metallic and shiny; designed to attract humans who have credit cards. It undoubtedly smelled of machine oil, gears, and Charlie Chaplin. I washed it down with soap and water, as recommended in the directions. So now it smelled like machine oil, gears, Charlie Chaplin, and Dove. I placed the trap inside the garden, close to and facing the groundhog’s red carpet entrance way. I baited it with what few carrot fronds and collard greens were left over from its recent brunch.

And I waited.

I had no idea what I was going to do with the groundhog once I’d caught it. Transporting it to place more suitable for a groundhog, like the county dump, might seem like the humane thing to do. But it is illegal to transport nuisance groundhogs around the county. Or across county lines. Eventually, you probably end up in trouble with ICE. I called several veterinarians to see if they would euthanize a live-trapped groundhog. Only if it is injured, they said. Somehow, I am supposed to trap the groundhog, break its leg, and then take it to the vet. Of course, if I had a shotgun I could violently blow it to smithereens and nobody would care. I might even get a medal.

So I waited, and hoped that I never caught it.

In the end, I never did catch the groundhog. For some mysterious reason it stopped raiding my garden. I like to imagine it moved on to greener pastures. “No offense, but the pickings are sweeter over here in the gated community.” Variety is the spice of life. A wandering groundhog I.

But perhaps it just passed the calories from my broccoli on up the food chain. A coyote’s got to make a living too, you know. On the other hand, some of my neighbors do have shotguns and they enjoy target practice on a Sunday morning.

In any case, the groundhog got the last laugh. Those overgrown weeds and brush? In ripping them out I acquired a nasty case of poison ivy.

My woodchuck taught me many valuable lessons.

• Gorilla warfare, or rather groundhog warfare, works. It’s effective.
• If it smells like a trap, it is probably a trap.
• Don’t go into a trap.
• Your adversaries, in their haste and zeal, will likely give themselves poison ivy.

The war you are in is not always the war you think you are in.