How Plumbers Are Like Groundhogs

I just finished reading this book that a pool-friend thought I might like – it was a wide-ranging look at what happens when nature comes into conflict with humans. I only know this pool-friend from being in the locker room/pool at the same time for many years, and she knows that we have this farm, and she is an avid gardener so she thought I might like to read something smart and funny about black bears and leopards and other troublesome varmints. (If you want to learn about how the official Fish and Wildlife folks deal with animals that won’t stop living their lives in human habitats, it’s Fuzz by Mary Roach.)

As longtime readers already know, I have been in an ongoing skirmish with the animals that want to chew up our crops.  We have come back around to goose season.  Canada geese that don’t migrate because they were born around here, those flocks are getting bigger and more troublesome all the time. In the winter, they always come to our fields in Vienna and eat as much cover crop as they can and poop as much as possible.  The book talked about how naturalists were asked to deal with a bird problem – there was a massive campaign to kill blackbirds in the midWest in the mid-1900s because the farmers were sure that the birds were eating a huge percentage of the grain.  After much study and calculating and not much success at killing redwing blackbirds, they figured out that the birds were eating less grain per acre than what was spilled between combine and truck.   However, I can stand there and count how many geese there are in the field, and I can see how much poop is spread all over.  People always say, but isn’t that free fertilizer? And I always say, is that what you really want to be feeding your lettuce plants?  Raw manure?  It’s actually illegal, from a food safety standpoint. So in the winter, I kid you not, I go to the field and chase those disgusting birds out of the field every day, sometimes multiple times a day. The real mission is to keep them from laying eggs and hatching them here. That would mean that the geese who were hatched here would consider this their home and would always come back, for all time. In fact, the conclusion in the book was that the most effective way to keep birds out of a field turns out to be paying an adult to chase them out, running like a crazy person and looking menacing. Yep, that’s what I do. They found that paying children to do it is not effective. The kids get bored with that job. The birds always figure out very quickly that the bombs and the waving streamers and the guns going off periodically do not mean anything, and they learn to ignore them.

Back in the old days, we used to try to kill groundhogs until there were no more. It was a fool’s errand. You can kill groundhogs and slow down the eating, but the groundhog holes will have invisible “For Rent” signs up immediately, and a new batch of chubby, plant-eating rodents will move in.  Some holes are in really high value places, at the edge of the woods, just 20 feet from the nearest row of salad mix.  By now I have found most of the high dollar woodchuck condos and I have been working to bring down the value of the real estate.  I still believe in this method, even if it requires a fair amount of upkeep.  I fill those holes with rotting vegetables or the cooked bones of chickens or whatever the regular animals won’t eat (the chickens and pigs get first dibs on these foods, and then the groundhogs get the leftovers). When we don’t have pigs or chickens, the groundhogs get the sour milk and moldy bread all to themselves.  I fill the holes, pushing the food down as far as I can, and then I jam sticks in to the entrance/exit until it is really hard to clear.  Then I go away for a few days.  Eventually they dig it out and clean up.  Groundhogs are finicky about cleanliness.  After a few weeks of this, they stop digging out. They move on.  Triumph.  The carrot tops grow back and all is not lost.  I drive around on my golf cart, checking the holes.  Sometimes they are abandoned for months and even years at a time. Then someone else moves in and we start over.  This science writer did not encounter anyone else who had this method.  You have to be pretty determined and crazy to do this. It suits me.

So why does the title say that plumbers are like groundhogs?  It’s not a perfect analogy but it came to mind yesterday when I was trying to teach the construction workers not to travel a route which is off limits to them. They have been told repeatedly, in clear well-articulated English, that the gate between the farm and Blueberry Hill is not a legal access point.  They are not allowed to drive through there.  I promised VDOT ten years ago that I would defend that gate and only farm workers would use it. By law, VDOT was supposed to close it off to all traffic, but we wanted a golf cart and tractor path.  It has not been easy, defending that gate.  When people get stuck in terrible traffic on Route 7, someone inevitably gets smart and drives through the farm on our gravel roads, despite the signage saying FARM VEHICLES ONLY.   The plumbers and other tradespeople who are renovating the New House have of course discovered this short cut and they have no reason to go all the way around and come in the front driveway.  We can say what we want, they do not care. They open it in the morning, drive through, and leave it open.  (In the winter, we don’t even drive vehicles on our farm roads because they are so muddy. These guys are just trashing the place.)

Yesterday I decided to make it much harder to go through there. We still want to be able to take golf carts through, and we could put a lock on there, but what a pain. I tied it shut with wire and put a new sign up with more explicit instructions.  And then, not satisfied with that mild-mannered effort, I parked a truck right across the road. This is equivalent to filling their hole with sticks and rotten onions. They have to take note. They have to change their ways.  They need non-verbal cues.

Of course, today none of those tradespeople were working on the house so I did not get immediate gratification. But just as with groundhogs and deer and geese, you have to play the long game. That’s the only way to win.  All of these varmints and people have different goals and priorities, and they have to be discouraged through persistent effort. Killing them just doesn’t seem to be the real answer. And guess what? That’s what the book concluded too. They do have to kill the bears who have become killers themselves but mostly the answer to these conflicts is exclusion and co-existence.  The leopards are a real menace, and the trouble is that people are trying to live where leopards want to live.  At least groundhogs are not a danger to people.  The stakes in this fight are much less dire.  If it were me, I might be the one to move if leopards were eating children in my village.