Pests

July 3, 2024

When I express affection for a “pest” animal, I often get one of two replies from people. The first is rage or anger — because they loved something that died in that animal’s hands or jaws. And that is fair.

When you know a thing, when it is personal, you are denied the easy comfort of abstraction. It wounds.

The other is an assumption is that I am starry-eyed or naive. Urban and innocent. And that’s a fair assumption. I do coo over most every living thing I encounter. They are glorious and fascinating.

But my love is not blind. My admiration doesn’t rest on conditions of cuteness. Everything is gross if you look hard enough. Rabbits eat their own cecal poop straight out of their butt. Pigeons barf up milk for their babies. I could go on.

I see a lot of killing and a lot of death here. The snake’s jaw spread wide as it swallows the still living frog. The mourning dove’s egg smashed to the ground, a mostly formed baby bird inside. The phoebe gone, her eggs eaten, perhaps by the flying squirrels. And I find flying squirrel tails strewn around the yard, their own owners devoured.

I’ve seen an adult weasel dive into a chipmunk hole, break the adult’s neck, and clean out the burrow of its kin.

Have you ever seen a baby weasel? I have. It’s adorable. A tiny stumbling puppy with big feet. If its parents don’t kill, it will starve to death. Stand there and watch. None of it, none of it is easy. None of it is simple.

I am not new to predation of my own little food patch either. We’ve been 7 years here so far. I have seen plants I’ve grown from carefully saved seed nipped off or slimily munched or casually tossed out of the ground. Hard work and late nights uprooted. Expensive blueberry bushes tooth-pruned down to the ground. Corn ready to harvest tomorrow, harvested by raccoons tonight.

I live in the company of wild things and they live in the company of me.

I’ve killed baby frogs and hibernating bees by mowing the yard to keep it tick-safe for us. I’ve driven over a chipmunk, its life ended under my car. I dig up soil webs and chop up habitat. I work to keep my footprint light, but it is not zero.

The parsley I carefully transferred a young swallowtail caterpillar onto has been eaten. Was the swallowtail still there when the groundhog or rabbit came by for dinner? I don’t know. Perhaps a lustrous songbird came and gobbled it long before the groundhog even woke up. I’ve watched as a gorgeous wren with banded plumaged took a vivid green caterpillar and bashed it to death against a post. And then the little bird fed it to its family. Everything lives, everything eats, everything dies.

I do not make a living off my gardens. And critters or no, we don’t grow enough here to sustain us. Farmers have a much harder job and far less room for losses than I do. But even I have my goals and my freezer to fill. Though hate is poor fertilizer. Instead I turn to chicken wire and elevation. Raised beds, resowing, and alternative plantings. Cultivating abundance to tolerate the inevitable losses. Eating something else when needed. We adapt.

There is one animal responsible for daily destruction of habitat on an unprecedented and bone-chilling scale, and it sure ain’t the groundhog. It’s not the groundhog who flies around the planet, knowingly polluting the skies in the name of pleasure. We humans fill the water with waste, and ruin the soil with shortsightedness. We choose to wreck the planet’s resilience, slice its throat open, knife across the jugular. We compromise its future for every other creature that slithers, flutters, flies, walks or crawls — including our own young.

Munching a little parsley doesn’t seem so bad by comparison. The groundhogs are alright by me.

~Kate