It's awfully hard to think about gardening when the temperature is well below freezing and the world outside my window is so white. Fortunately with Groundhog Day soon to be upon us, I have a nice excuse to write about woodchucks, a pertinent subject for gardeners, right?
Old Mother Westwind introduced me to roly-poly Johnny Chuck when I was just a youngster. I found him very appealing until my family introduced me to his real live cousin who was getting roly-poly eating fresh vegetables from our garden. This fat fellow was so hated by my Mom, the gardener, that she kept a shotgun close at hand until she'd managed to do him in.
Finding a woodchuck living close enough to feast on your growing vegetables is as bad as learning that the IRS has scheduled you for an audit. (Having spent the last week tackling Taylor taxes I can't think of a better simile.) Discouraging the auditor is probably easier than getting rid of the woodchuck. The day of your appointment gather as many ill-mannered children under six as you can find and bring them along with you. As for the woodchuck, shotguns and dogs are the best solution.
The woodchuck is a rodent, closely related to other gnawing animals, whose paws are designed for digging, enabling him to make his underground tunnels with ease and have no trouble getting beneath the vegetable garden fence if necessary. . His claws also enable him to climb, even a 40-foot tree. He rarely does so, but when he does, he returns to the ground headfirst, defying gravity just like a nuthatch. He's also smart enough to make several entrances to his den that don't have a telltale pile of excavated dirt outside them.
The furry creature sitting on his haunches in the middle of a meadow looks very different than he does at birth. He's born as bare-naked as a bird, as hairless as a peeled peach. It takes a month for him to grow his fur coat and open his eyes. At six weeks he switches from Mom's milk to grass, weeds, small bugs and of course any vegetables you'd care to offer. Leaving the home nest, he digs his own modest burrow and begins to stuff himself into a roly-poly state in preparation for a winter of hibernation.
Although there may still be plenty to eat in October, the chuck stops eating (earlier sunsets are his clock) and sits around waiting for his digestive tract to empty. Then he retires to his cozy nest. As his sleep deepens, his body temperature plummets to a chilly 40 degrees, his breathing slows from 35 times a minute to only one every five minutes, and his heart beats so lethargically that if he got a wound it wouldn't even bleed.
So what makes Americans think a ground hog that went to ground in October would suddenly wake up on February 2nd and dig his way through a pile of white stuff to check out the weather? According to what I read, Ground Hog Day is also Candlemas on the Christian calendar, the day Christ entered the temple, and a sunny Candlemas presages a cold spring. In America's version, a day sunny enough for the groundhog sees his shadow sends him scurrying back down his hole for another six weeks. Here in the Icebox of Connecticut it's more like two months.
In truth, a hibernating woodchuck rarely wakes up in February, even when other animals take shelter in his burrow. If an uninvited guest such as a skunk arrives before the woodchuck is truly zonked out, the chuck will chatter and whistle and glare, but the skunk will stamp his foot, and you know what that means and so does the chuck. He has little choice but to build a wall of dirt and shut himself into a small area, leaving the rest of his home to the invader. If the skunk arrives after the chuck is snoring, he settles in without permission and often lets his buddies join him.
Since we have always had dogs that sleep outside in the hay at night, we never had the problem of woodchucks raiding the vegetable garden, but we had plenty of woodchucks. When we bought Locust Hill its meadows were pockmarked with woodchuck holes, a serious hazard for the farmer who cut, raked and baled the hay each July. It wasn't until coyotes moved into the neighborhood and killed the chucks or scared them into making their homes in the hedgerows, that our meadows finally turned into smooth green blankets.
Then the problem was how to protect the sheep from the coyotes, but you've heard that story before.
