Howard Stern Speaks To Floyd The Groundhog

Ruminant With A View

by Elizabeth Boleman-Herring

TEANECK, NJ—(Weekly Hubris)—9/6/10—Floyd was named for a tall, tough, teen-aged fourth-grader with whom James Thurber went to grammar school. Big for his age, and even bigger for the fourth grade, Floyd protected the timid, retiring, if erudite Thurber at Columbus, Ohio’s no-holds-barred Sullivant school, beating the tar out of anyone who messed with America’s great and future humorist.

Floyd, a New Jersey groundhog weighing in at c. 25-35 pounds, could well have beaten the tar out of me and Dean, with one paw tied behind his furry little back. Which is just what I told the Teaneck Police’s desk sergeant when I dropped in to inquire about just how we were to rid ourselves of the third, uninvited, tenant of 1175 Queen Anne Road.

“He’s trying to move our garage from its present location. Without a permit,” I reasoned, sweetly.

Officer Desk looked down at me from his little window, poker-faced. “Only way to move him is with a humane cage,” he said, “and they’ll run you about a hundred dollars apiece. You may need a couple of’em”

Humane cage. My husband is a jazz musician and big band leader, a sort of descended-from-Dutchmen, Rochester, NY version of Ricky Ricardo . . . to my Lucille Ball. Neither of us is an animal wrangler, unless you count spiders. Especially a wrangler of 35-pound groundhogs lurking in very dark, crowded garages already containing Ford Explorers.

“Which one of us do you want to wrangle this varmint into a humane trap?” I asked. “The one who plays the trumpet, or the one who’s recovering from spinal fusion surgery?”

“Is the animal rabid?”

“Do I ask him before or after he attaches himself to my ankle?” (Wrong answer: if I’d said, “Yes, Floyd’s frothing at his little jaws and acting all cuckoo, Officer Poker-Desk would have dispatched him forthwith with his service revolver, but I wasn’t yet up on Teaneck code-speak.)

“Ma’am, you just have to understand. In Bergen County, we don’t injure or maim, let alone kill, healthy wildlife. You’ll need to call a pest control expert.”

“We did. He’s the one who charged us $400. to remove the squirrels and raccoons from our attic. His ‘extraction cages,’ as he called them, situated in the eaves, have simply been turned into squirrel and raccoon ‘front porches,’ padded with nice, soft leaves.”

“Well, if you’ve already paid him for work done badly, perhaps he’d feel obliged to come back for the groundhog.”

“I’m not as stupid as I look, Officer”

Don’t get me wrong. I’m an animal lover. I was a vegetarian for decades, until my iron levels dropped so low, my GP said, in effect, it was meat, or meet my Maker. I relocate bees and spiders under drinking glasses by sliding an index card between the bug and the surface it stands ipon. I once took in 16 cats, two goats, a dog no one wanted, and a pair of parrots.

But I have my limits. Try to turn my garage into a sinkhole, and block access to my vehicle, and I am liable to take up . . . a slingshot.

“I wouldn’t advise it, M’am. You might hit him in the eye, and blind him.”

“You’re kidding, right? At 40 feet, I can hit a milk bottle cap, repeatedly, with a .22. At ten feet, I would NOT hit Floyd in the eye, Officer: I’d hit him in his ample hindquarters. Pellet gun?” I asked, being from South Carolina.

“Not permitted in Bergen County.”

“No paint gun, either, then?”

“Nope. In New Jersey, I repeat, we treat animals humanely.”

“In South Carolina, we treat varmints like varmints and taxpayers humanely,” I piped back. “I guess sling-shots are out, too, then?”

“No sling-shots, M’am. Just the humane cage.”

“And which one of us professional animal wranglers do you see hoisting a humane cage full of 30-pound Floyd into the 15-year-old Jeep? The 60-year-old recovering hernia-surgery patient with glaucoma, or his 58-year-old wife, who’s just had $180,000. worth of spinal fusion?”

“Well, M’am, all I can say is you’ll have to take this up with Animal Control or a good pest man.”

I thought I had a “good pest man” right there before me but, uncharacteristically, for Upstate South Carolinians, I held my tongue. On my way out the door, the departmental secretary called me aside to say she, too, had had groundhogs on her property, “right in the middle of Teaneck,” she said, and they’d made a shambles of her garden. She hinted she’d taken matters into her own hands.

And she had not, of course, actually seen what Floyd was capable of.

For about a decade, he’d lived peaceably enough beneath a giant rotted tree trunk to the right of the garage. True, Dean had placed the occasional weighty slab of slate over his hole, but we’d find the stone moved, like Christ’s from the tomb, every morning thereafter. We knew Floyd’s strength firsthand, and our garage and driveway weren’t up to this critter.

Most groundhogs, apparently, work during the daylight hours, but Floyd, with the benefit of our garage-mounted security lights, which he handily turned on and off at will, scurrying about his groundhoggy little earthworks, worked tirelessly, day and night.

This spring, just after my back surgery, we came out to discover he’d tunneled under the driveway, and come up, first, in the middle of the concrete, then dived back down to tunnel farther, creating a back door and sun-porch for himself to the left of the structure. The driveway was sagging, and an enormous pile of fresh soil formed a nice little ziggurat just where Dean is wont to turn Skatoulaki III, his aged Jeep, around of a morning on his way out the driveway.

While I kept watch from the upstairs bedroom window, Dean waited below, garden hose in hand, for Floyd to appear. I had a surgeon’s post-op appointment to get to, my car was inside the garage and, wouldn’t you know it, the moment Floyd showed his whiskers and Dean pelted him with water, the massive rodent hightailed it under my Explorer, his avoirdupois rippling as he ran.

“Well, I’m not going in there and getting taken off at the ankles,” I wailed.

“Gol-dern it,” said Dean, in defeat.

Eventually, Floyd, realizing he was only up against the two doofuses with whom he’d shared a home for a decade, nonchalantly sauntered out of the garage, and paraded slowly around the corner.

“That’s it,” I said, heading back to the Police Department.

As luck would have it, I pulled in just as Sue, of Animal Control, was driving up in her enormous Animal-Control-Mobile. As she rolled down the tinted passenger side window for me, I was hit by a blast of air conditioned to about 20 degrees Fahrenheit.

Sue, unlike Ricky and Lucy, looked like she could wrangle Floyd, and Floyd’s minions, handily but she, too, was having none of my violent solutions. “Is she rabid,” Sue asked and, once again, I missed my cue.

“No, eh? Well, you should google groundhogs,” she said brightly. “They’re fascinating creatures!” I didn’t want to tell Sue I had no intention of writing the groundhog equivalent of Moby Dick, and I’d already googled groundhogs.

“Before you start, “I said, “I know the drill, Sue. My husband’s put dried blood down every hole in a one-acre radius of our house. Good thing we don’t live near a golf course.”

“Are you sure this isn’t a momma groundhog with babies down there?” she asked, genuinely concerned. “You could trap her underground with all that dried blood and jeopardize the babies.”

“BABIES!? Sue, this thing doesn’t have babies. It has BALLS! Know the gym on Main? Where I taught Yoga till my recent back surgery? Know the owner? Oleg Nazinsky? Well, Floyd is the groundhog world’s equivalent of Oleg. This thing is no one’s mother.”

Well, said Sue, “Here’s another couple of tricks that really work. Place a small radio right next to one of the holes and tune it to 10-10-WINS, as loud as the neighbors can stand it. Groundhogs have very sensitive hearing and those high-pitched station identification riffs really bother them.”

She paused. “Howard Stern works well, too.”

My jaw fell wide open about here.

“Also, if you stuff grass clippings down a hole,” Sue went on, blithely, “they decompose and the groundhogs don’t like the smell. Doesn’t bother humans, but their noses are a lot more sensitive than ours.”

As I say, my people hail from South Carolina, where a couple of yokels are currently facing off for the US Senate seat but, I have to say, my Southern compatriots seem to have a lot more common sense than these Jersey suburbanites.

Howard Stern? Grass clippings? “Anything else,” I asked, wearily.

“Well, you can cut mylar—you know, from those birthday balloons?—into strips and hang it from little stakes around both entranceways. Groundhogs don’t like fluttery, shiny stuff.”

I just bet they don’t. Especially if it’s coming out the business end of a shotgun.

Teaneck, you’re on notice: the next time I have to call the police, or Animal Control, about a varmint, I’m going to say, evenly, “There’s a huge, rabid (fill in the blank with your varmint of choice) menacing me from the backyard. And send Sue, please.”

But, for the nonce, I knew I was defeated, that Floyd would, eventually, evict us from every structure on our property, and New Jersey might well fall into the hole left behind. I was rolling up my car window when Sue squeezed a slip of paper in to me. “I shouldn’t be recommending anyone in particular,” she said, “but Del’s Pest Arrest has never let me down.”

I could see another $400. bill coming in the mail, but it would beat repairing the garage and driveway. “Thanks, Sue.”

The minute I called Del’s and got Jim on the line, I had a feeling our troubles, and Floyd, were history.

“I’ll be right over,” said Jim. Since I was at back rehab at the time, I didn’t actually witness the setting of the trap, which Jim accessorized with fresh green peppers and a water bottle, but I just couldn’t believe the speed with which Floyd fell for the ploy. In a matter of hours, we had ourselves a huge, trapped, male groundhog, some half-eaten peppers, and a mauled water bottle.

I felt sort of sorry for the little guy when I saw him, sturdy little paws wrapped around steel bars, looking out and up at me in puzzlement.

“Where will you take him, Jim?” I was suddenly contrite.

“Oh, he’ll got to a nice wildlife refuge with lots of nice female groundhogs and lots of cover and habitat,” said Jim. “He’ll be just fine.”

“And there’s no chance he’ll hitch a ride back, or car-jack someone?”

“Nope.” Man of few words, our Jim.

So, just like that, Floyd was gone from our lives . . . for a price.

But Jim did save us, and Floyd, from having to listen to non-stop Howard Stern, my Explorer now sits peacefully, again, in the shambles of our garage, and we can sleep through the night without the security lights flashing on and off at 15-minute intervals.

Ahhh, The Garden State!