peterography

A week ago I harvested my first zucchini of the season. It was firm and shiny, dark green and plump –nothing like the light and limp well-traveled ones in the supermarket – my zucchini was a pleasure to behold and to eat.

Last year my zukes were destroyed by woodchucks who got in early before the plants matured. This year there had been no sign of them while the plants flowered and the fruit fattened, and I credited improvements I made in my fence over the winter.

My sense of security turned out to be false. Last Wednesday I found some chewed-off stalks. By Friday they had eaten the fruit, the leaves, and more stalks. In desperation I set out live traps; I distributed large blocks of poison; I dropped wires from my electric deer fence, baited with carrots and aluminum foil coated with peanut butter.

The squirrels who recently ate all the apples in my largest apple tree, and then went on to eat the rose hips of the bushes bordering our deck, ate the poison and died. The 6000 volt carrots and the live trap were ignored; and the woodchucks destroyed everything that was left of my zucchini. Every day my fantasies of woodchuck-icide grew more detailed and lurid. My wife wanted to know would I really kill a furry little woodland creature? On Sunday I spied one running across the yard; I had a pitchfork in hand and threw it like a javelin, hoping to impale him, but I missed by an inch. I hadn’t hesitated a second.

This morning at breakfast I looked out my window and saw a little nose poking from a hole near my bulkhead. Then another appeared and two baby woodchucks emerged from the opening. They were cute – far cuter than I wanted them to be. They stood up together, sniffing the air and blinking in the morning sun. I grabbed my camera to take pictures and snapped the shutter just as one gazed directly into the telephoto lens.

They looked soft and cuddly and had pretty white rings around their noses and adorable big black eyes. I tried to remind myself that cuteness serves the same function as an armadillo’s hide, a gazelle’s speed or the smell of a skunk - self-protection. We’re wired up to find babies cute so we don’t strangle them when they take off their dirty diapers and drape them on the cat. Baby woodchucks and other small animals enjoy the collateral benefits of this.

But only to a point. Examining the photos showed that these little groundhogs were covered with flies, and encrusted with something brown and gross-looking. Not so cute close up. Good thing, too.