Oh! Deer!

It started yesterday afternoon with a doe munching the lower branches of the elderberry bush in the back yard’s “wet spot.” She then proceeded to knosh her way across that wet spot, then to the barren pear tree, and finished with a few tastes of oak at the edge of the woods. Later, a forkhorn(?) buck browsed across the top of the hill behind the house while two does nibbled around the wet spot. Finally, early evening visitors were a pair of does checking the back yard next to the house. I don’t know and couldn’t tell if the does were one pair or five individuals. Why the visitors chose our place with, presumably, lots of other forage available, isn’t at all clear but they were fun to watch.

the first of yesterday’s visitors

Photo by J. Harrington

This summer there appears to have been an underground explosion in the vole / mole(?) population. There are way more tunnels than usual, due to the mild winter? I would be very happy to see a substantial increase in predators but may settle for getting some “new and improved” mole traps. The one I have has caught only one or two moles in the last twenty years or so. Of course, that may be because I’m never sure if a tunnel is active when I set the trap.

The live trap that was repositioned to catch the chipmunk that moved under the front stoop has been unproductive so far. Maybe we have a chipmunk that doesn’t care for chunky peanut butter. Would an apple slice do the trick? We’ll soon see if the critter isn’t caught in a day or two.

Varmints like moles and pocket gophers make a mess of the grounds but they don’t bite us and suck our blood the way mosquitos and deer flies do. The Better Half hasn’t fussed about deer eating her flower plants since she started hanging mouse/deer repellant I bought to protect the wiring harness of the tractor from mice. I’ve been reading a fair amount about treating all of nature as relations, which I suppose works if we accept the old adage about being able to choose our friends but not our relatives.

Catching the Moles

By Judith Kitchen

First we tamp down the ridges 

that criss-cross the yard 

then wait for the ground 

to move again. 

I hold the shoe box, 

you, the trowel. 

When I give you the signal 

you dig in behind 

and flip forward. 

Out he pops into daylight, 

blind velvet. 

We nudge him into the box, 

carry him down the hill. 

Four times we’ve done it. 

The children worry. 

Have we let them all go 

at the very same spot? 

Will they find each other? 

We can’t be sure ourselves, 

only just beginning to learn 

the fragile rules of uprooting.

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