Dear Mr. Groundhog,

Your days are numbered Mr. Groundhog.  Or maybe it's Mrs. or Ms. I really don't care. You think you are cute and lovable and have full range of the land. Let me make something perfectly clear to you.  I live on ll acres. I garden in less than sixty square feet. I have never messed with your monster mouth ways of munching on wild things in my meadows, your sucking down of the mulberry leaves from my  berry producing tree and I ignore your occasionaly mid-day raids into my cultivated wildflowers. And I know it is you and your flabby kin with bloated bodies that have dug those dens at the edge of the barn foundation. And I also know it's you that plops down and suns your fat lazy hide next to the glacial erratic. (And since you never took a geology class Mr. Groundhog, glacial erratic is the fancy name for that big rock from the Canadian shield that was pushed here during the last glacier. And you probably don't even know - cause all you do is eat and eat and eat - that your very name groundhog is interchangable with the word woodchuck.)  But now you boldy approach the very edge of my tiny vegtable garden and look at the goodies with those beedy little eyes of yours. And you seem to be saying that when I leave for work you are going to work---on my garden. Well, let me tell you something buddy! I am friends with the coyote, the red fox and the red tailed hawk. Call us kindred spirits.  And they have my blessings to do what they must do to do what they do to survive.  Let me explain that twisted sentence more clearly: THEY ARE GOING TO EAT YOU!  But there is a way out for you. Go away from the garden. Now! Don't even look back.  Run. Or maybe I should say waddle away. And then you won't meet their teeth, claws and fang. And then there will more left of you than the photo I took as you stared at me this morning.

with best regards,
Jonathan