Our current homestead came with an abundance of rodents: mice, red squirrels, chipmunks, grey squirrels, voles, moles.
But the worse were the woodchucks.
Big, arrogant, bullies. They ate my vegetables, they moved in under the house. They even stood on their stubby hind legs and ate the branches of the dwarf cherry trees.
It was war.
We fenced and tried scaring them away, even threw rocks.
The chubby groundhogs laughed.
We got live traps and did catch a few.
But the real turnaround came when we got Atwell.
In no time at all, the yard was rodent free. This tiger in a cat's body even faced down a raccoon (the coon was three times her size so I intervened).
After we found out that local schoolkids derogatorily call McDonough-ites "woodchucks", we couldn't resist slapping the name on our place, trusting Atwell to make sure 'chucks were there in name only.
Atwell was an outside cat and one day went walk-about and never returned. We've had two other cats since but none had the spirit of that yellow tabby.
We're cat-less at present but the very first animal we'll get at our new place will be feline to insure there won't be a Woodchuck Acres II.
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