For as long as I can recall, there has been a hole in the ground here. People stop to look at it, and then reflexively kick dirt into it because it looks like a tripping hazard. The next day the hole is back. It’s the opposite of healing up.
There’s more than one of them. They’re in a cluster, like herpes. People stand around and speculate about our holes, as people will do. The consensus is they’re rat holes. I have never known exactly where rats live but people talk about rat holes all the time, and never in an approving way. They must exist.
Other than kicking dirt into the holes, we haven’t done anything about them. And we’ve never seen anyone going in or out. For decades, now, we haven’t seen anyone going in or out. If they’re rats, they’re considerate about it. It’s like finding out the new folks in the house on the corner are cooking meth or dissecting small woodland creatures in their basement: if they’re quiet? Hey. Live and let live.
One time, genuinely worried that someone will snap their ankle stepping in the hole, I got a big pile of rocks and dumped them in. The next day the hole was back, good as new, with a short masonry wall around it, some foundation plantings, and a tiny mailbox. I thought about flooding it with a hose, but then the next day we’d find an entire aqueduct system draining to the street. Bridges, tunnels, drop shafts, siphons, the works.
I don’t really love the idea of a rat hole near the house. But one doesn’t want to judge. Until you actually see signs of nefarious activity, you should keep a lid on your prejudicial nature, just in general. This is true of people too. I mean, I believe I am capable of alerting to an actual threat, but I don’t want to walk around inside a dark cloud of suspicion. That’s a heavy burden to haul around with you, and lazy too, always making judgments based on rank generalizations without any effort to determine the truth. There are too many people like that already. I don’t want to be another one.
Can you imagine it? What if, say, you were a complete failure as a human being with no redeeming features whatsoever, contributing nothing, surviving on pure bullshit and self-promotion, culminating in a nasty-ass reality TV show, having no inkling of shared commonality with the human world—a person manifestly unqualified for any position requiring your thumb to be out of your ass, and you got a gigantic megaphone and blamed random disasters on diversity hiring? No, it could never happen. Too far-fetched.
I looked up rat holes. Says here that a family of around eight rats can live in a given burrow, stashing food in the pantry cupboards and building multiple levels. It sounds cozy, actually. The description fit our holes to a T: size, location, several entrances, a fan of dirt at the top: let’s just call it a veranda. I had to admire the persistence of the holes over the many years. This has clearly been a long-planned underground operation, and we have no idea how extensive it is really, or how many are involved.
But since there doesn’t seem to be anything to do about them, I recast them along friendlier lines. They probably work elsewhere, such as the Mexican restaurant dumpster down the street, and I’ve just missed seeing them on their morning and evening commute. Which means they’re upscale rats, living in a bedroom community, as it were, quietly raising hawk and coyote food. I can give them a pass for now.
And I will, until the day I see them emerge from their holes bearing chunks of insulation, electrical wiring, gold, hooch, a little black book of hot underage rats, and a plan.
By that time it will be too late to vote the assholes out.
We’ll just have to keep that pile of rocks handy.
I have a thriving community of groundhogs in my yard. They have front doors and back doors to their burrows. One of their front doors is under a wood pallet holding firewood.
I’ve read that their burrows have various rooms: a place for sleeping, a larder for food; and even a toilet, which is situated well away from the other two areas. I’m just sayin’ what Google told me. The ‘hogs have never invited me to their place.
I throw cracked corn into the driveway for them, and it’s cute to see them nomming away on it. I’m sure that they store some of that corn in their larder for the winter, so that they can whip up a nice polenta with mushrooms. Mmmm… I wish they would invite me over. I’d bring a nice pinot noir and a salad.
I occasionally have groundhogs in my yard and I don’t mind that they climb my apple tree and eat the fruit. I don’t eat it, they’re welcome to it.
I live in a tiny community with tiny yards. My next door neighbor isn’t fine about groundhogs, so when they show up they very quickly disappear. Not sure how that’s accomplished, but I figure it’s something lethal as relocated groundhogs are very good at finding their way home. Same with squirrels and mice. My brother (the one with all the money) experimented with that and compared notes with a neighbor. After squirrels came back from twenty miles away they just started gassing them. He said it was a useless activity as he equated the squirrel population in his city to the ocean and described their efforts at attempting to lower the level of the ocean with a spoon.
I wish my neighbor didn’t get rid of the groundhogs. I like them. Also bunnies and chipmunks. Squirrels are assholes and rats are horrors with feet.
Okay, refresh my memory, are groundhogs the same as what we called woodchucks when I was growing up in Virginia?
Yes, they are. In some parts, they are also called Whistle Pigs.
I thought those were pikas! Now I need to look it all up.
Hold up–whistle pigs are marmots–like the kind in the mountains. But I agree that woodchucks are groundhogs.
Dey all marmots though.
I was thinking this was going to be about a sinkhole, but rat holes, hmm. The ones I’ve dealt with in my yard relocated when I filled the holes. I guess your rats are more committed to their holes than mine.
Read recently about rat birth control, which is seen as being friendlier to the animals that eat rats while limiting the number of rat pups that can be produced. Sounded like a great idea, but when I checked the price was absurdly high for a small number of pieces. As far as I could see this was just a temporary fix, not something that rendered the rats permanently sterile. In my book if you’re not going to kill the rats, making them permanently sterile is the next best thing. Inhibiting their reproduction for a month is like sticking a Dutchboy’s finger in a dike.
My brother (the successful child) was once tasked with developing a drug to render pigs sterile. In hog husbandry, sterility in male pigs intended for eating is desirable at an early age. Older male pigs develop a taste that is only detectable by a percentage of the population, but which puts them off eating pork. The traditional solution has been castration, which is time consuming and comes with potential health risks. A few big pig producers reasoned that a drug that rendered a pig sterile would be easier to administer and safer.
My brother was successful. The drug worked great, but not just on pigs. It also rendered humans sterile. Not sure how he determined that as the evidence is that his reproductive health wasn’t affected (four children). So the drug was shelved and the hog farmers continued sterilizing male pigs in the traditional manner.
I do wonder about the side effects to animals eating rats on birth control.
Okay now, wait, are the potential health risks of castration to the pigs? Because it seems to me the castration providers could be in a world of hurt too. Which reminds me of a joke my Dad used to tell (once a year or so, and credited to HIS father, so it’s a definite antique) involving a couple of 2x4s and the promise not to hurt the donkey, and the line “I kept my thumbs out.”
I’d forgotten about whistle pigs, but yes. And confirming Mimi, woodchucks and groundhogs are the same thing. I use the names interchangeably. Woodchucks are the smallest and easternmost marmot species. I encountered a hoary marmot in Glacier National Park. It had gotten used to people food and would take offerings from your fingers. We were feeding it cookies, really bad choice.
Murr, traditional castration IIRC didn’t involve surgery. I think it was cautery instead. I could be wrong.
If it was surgery, then there’s the risks of anesthesia, the actual surgery and subsequent risk of infection. And as you suggested, the farm workers could be at risk from the pigs. Even piglets have tusks. Discovered that back in the days when I was prepping demo piglets for biology labs.
I was trying to figure out how your story went, but would like to see it written out. There’s a classic story about camels where the punch line is Brick ‘em!
I found a burrow entrance (or maybe exit) in my yard. I ran lots of water into it, but we’re on a slope, so it probably emerged somewhere downhill from us. I filled the opening with rocks. A few months later, repeat a few feet away, same treatment. I haven’t seen any more activity since, and I don’t know which of several possible critter types it was. I grow my veggies in big pots, so things that emerge from the earth may not be a problem, though I recently learned that rats and mice will eat tomatoes if they’re hungry enough. After typing the foregoing, I clicked on “Post Comment” and got a screen blank except for the message “You are posting comments too quickly. Slow down.”
“Slow down.”
I get that admonition fairly often. What a sensitive machine. I don’t mind, though, because it reminds me of the Taxi episode when Jim Ignatowski (Christopher Lloyd) was trying to pass his driver’s exam.
Then there was the WKRP episode where Johnny Fever was getting faster and faster with his responses the more he drank. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wYbv_qZwgvc
If/when u want some free advice about the inhabitants and the holes ( they also provide free equipment ) the Multnomah County vector control folks are great. Our tax dollars at work!! They identified the holes in my yard as squirrel holes. Those *#** skittery rodents.
SQUIRRELS HAVE HOLES???? I mean, other than personal. Well. Maybe I’ll check with them. Purely out of curiosity. Or I should find a neighbor with one of those spy cameras.
The Vector Control are terrific folks and very helpful…. and yes- squirrels also sometimes dig holes – generally smaller- but very annoying!
Gray squirrels will dig holes to cache food, but not deep enough to enter. Red squirrels or chickarees will dig tunnels. They’re basically chipmunks on steroids. And then there’s ground squirrels that may climb if pressed, but prefer tunnels. I think you’d know if they were your tunnel makers. They come in a variety of species, some more strongly marked than others.
How much ground could a groundhog hog if a groundhog could hog ground? How much, huh? Look out for venture capital groundhogs taking over all the available ground and leasing it back to whomever at really high rates!
Dem some hogs all right.
Rats are mostly nocturnal I think which would explain why you don’t see them, you’d have to set up a night vision camera to capture images of whatever comes and goes to be completely sure. You’re probably right about the Chinese Restaurant dumpsters being their workplace of choice.
My night vision camera caught racoons, striped skunks, and possums all coming to drink at the fountain. Maybe I should have trained it on a different spot.
The general rule of thumb is when the rats appear in the daytime you have a serious infestation or disease. I’ve seen Norway rats (brown) and roof rats (black) here in the daytime. They were apparently healthy, but felt safe moseying around in the sunlight.
I’ve seen Norway and Asian roof rats in the daytime. Not whole bunches. And a night vision camera is what I need to borrow.
I’ve got one that’s never been used. You know how to contact me.
Decades ago, back in NJ, my father’s vegetable garden was being torn up by groundhogs, so he decided to set up a Have-a-heart trap to remove them. The plan was to drive the captured animals from Parsippany over to the other side of the Boonton reservoir to release them. The recommended bait was canned cat food, a product readily available since my mother maintained three enormous cats, which collectively nearly outweighed her (she was tiny, they were meat loafs. With tails). Dad really rather despised her cats, but being the tolerant sort, he put up with them. One night he set the trap for the groundhog, and in the morning before work, went out to check on it; inside, peacefully waiting, was Mom’s giant gray cat, Louie. Set a trap with cat food, catch a cat; seems logical. I always wondered just how tempted Dad must have been to dispose of Louie with a pleasant drive across town to the other side of the lake, possibly by pretending he never noticed that the groundhog was, in fact, a cat.
Ah, well. You know Louie got released. He never spoke of his night in the trap.
It’s no wonder he got a cat instead. I think that groundhogs are crepuscular, so if he set it at night, he would invariably get a cat — especially if their cats were outdoor cats. He’d have to get up at sunrise to set the trap, then check it later, while keeping the cats inside. But he’d probably get a raccoon instead. I don’t think that groundhogs are particularly keen on meat products. They seem to prefer vegetation. And cracked corn.
FTR… I would’ve gotten rid of the cat. “I dunno, honey. Maybe he ran off. Maybe he was hit by a car. Outside is a dangerous place for a cat.”
Yep, cat food for a woodchuck makes no sense. Apples, potatoes or corn would work.
My neighbor used to trap cats. I’m not sure what she did with them, but I wouldn’t have interfered. I ain’t a fan of cats in my garden. And I love cats. Mimi, I do like the line “he would invariably get a cat–especially if their cats were outdoor cats.” So true! And you get vanishingly few groundhogs with an indoor Havahart trap.
I’ve gotten raccoons, chipmunks, possum, birds, cats, squirrels and most recently a cute weasel I let go as i was told they kill squirrels.