There comes a time in every country homeowner’s life when they find themselves in a war with a groundhog. 

Battles are typically waged on a number of fronts, namely the front side of the shed, the back side of the shed, and of course the other two sides of the shed. 

Just as soon as you’ve plugged up one hole, these sneaky marmots (the official name of these oversized ground squirrels) have opened up two to three alternate entrances to continue their burrow building beneath your outbuilding. 

You will try everything. 

Human hair. Dog hair. 

Gravel. Garlic. 

Fencing. Flooding. 

The holes will stay closed for three days straight, and you’ll allow yourself a tiny but triumphant celebration of your genius. You’ve done it, you think. You’ve outsmarted the same creature known round the world for accurately predicting the weather about 40 percent of the time. 

You’ll fall into Facebook groups filled with old wives tales and country “fixes” that so-and-so’s great uncle swore worked every time, only to realize so-and-so’s uncle probably walked 5 miles uphill in the snow to get to school … then did the same thing on the way back home. 

Just like his math, his can’t fail trick for evicting pesky rodents is riddled with holes. 

You will lose yourself to the Google rabbit hole, furiously typing in long run-on sentence type queries like “make groundhog go away and not come back before lose my mind” and “Is it really illegal to trap and relocate a groundhog in NYS because I don’t want to be a monster who kills this thing, what the heck does the DEC want me to do instead, please help?”

Eventually, you’ll find yourself developing a grudging respect for the cat-sized creature that’s parked beneath your shed and admit that at least a few of the things you’ve picked up in all those Google searches makes you feel a little bit bad about all the time you’ve spent trying to kick a critter from its home. 

It builds a separate bathroom chamber in its burrow? How… civilized. 

It depends on its burrow as a place to rest and raise their young and it spends half the year putting on weight? Well, that all sounds familiar. 

It helps with aerating and distributing nutrients in the soil?

Fine. 

The white flag is raised… for this year anyway.