The back deck is so much
better in May. We have had a stretch of
10 sunny, increasingly warm days. All of which Pam has spent in the gardens,
expanding to the east, rearranging plants using her ‘poke and hope’
methodology that rarely fails. And if it
does, she does not mope, as plants are fungible and flexible. The rich green explodes everywhere, from the
depth of the lawn to the expanse of the hostas.
The chipmunks flourish to the
point where we implement traps to cut down on their incursion into soft parts
of the gardens. They know no boundaries,
of course, so even if we capture a few, they may be part of families
that live on the other side of our fences.
Our clans know where to hide out in their own tunnels, knowing full well
exactly where the best meals can be found.
These critters have a
different sense of ‘shelter-in-place’.
They are in constant shelter mode, having made numerous entry holes into
their underground tunnels. Their virus
is the collection of predators that stalk them – although I am not sure that
our suburbia contains that many threats.
I have seen a hawk swoop over the lawn and pluck a chipmunk off the
lawn, and we have a fox family that lives in the gully beyond the houses across
the street. Other than that, we humans
are the largest threat they seem to have.
