A Declaration of War

Some of us have seen Caddyshack a few too many times, but Bill Murray just keeps me coming back (Later, he made an unforgettable tribute to coming back in Groundhog Day, but that's another story). Back to Caddyshack and Bill Murray's lunatic groundskeeper, you will remember his campaign against the groundhogs at the Country Club. In the end, he blows up half the golf course, yet fails to get his man, er, groundhog.

Well, with that in mind, I ignored the invasion of a groundhog in my yard the first spring after we moved in. I knew I did not have the time to do battle. By midsummer he had disappeared, driven further underground by the heat? Only to return in the Fall, By Spring, he had invited his whole family to move in, and I started to reconsider peaceful co-existence as a policy of governance in my yard. I learned that they feed off lawn insects, so I treated the lawn for bugs a couple of times, it couldn't hurt.

In the mean time, I took to checking the lawn and garden aisles at Lowe's for weapons in my border skirmishes. I learned about the small poison pellets. You used the cone-shaped plastic bottle the pellets came in to create access to a tunnel, then dropped in a few pellets. Doing this, you could imagine your adversaries dropping dead as they feverishly burrowed around looking for a bug to take the awful taste out of their mouths. It's more pleasant than hand-to-hand combat with the little critters. In the end no real deterrence came as a result. The groundhogs were thriving.

I saw, but just didn't feel I wanted to try, the traps. A spring-loaded kind of mechanism you are supposed to push into one of the tunnels and catch the enemy walking along unsuspecting---and wham, the steel trap chops him in two. A yard warrior can then count coup over his fallen enemy when he pulls the trap from the ground.

"Wouldn't work for me," I said, I now had a whole tribe living under my lawn. "Knocking off one or two just won't cut it, I need a weapon of mass destruction." This Spring, I invested several hundred dollars in some sod (along with several hundred dollars a month in water to get it to stay alive. My yard has looked fine all summer, but the weather is cooling, and the early signs are that Groundhog Nation has returned. The good news is I have declared war with a modern weapon at my disposal. So, this afternoon I put on my best Bill Murray camo outfit and deployed my secret weapons--SONIC SPIKES. They are solar-powered, giant spikes that emit sonic pulses that are probably ear-splitting to groundhogs. They are said to drive out the enemy within 7 to 14 days. Stay tuned--War has been declared.