The entrance to this pipe has been carved away a little bit.
A few arm-thick branches and some dirt, and all is well again.
I try not to mess with entrances to settes, in part because I try to preserve settes and I think front doors are important. Another reason is that it is too easy to collapse the entrance to a sette which means you have cut off air to the dog.
In the sette, above, however, the dog could just barely get in before having to turn hard to come up a side pipe in pursuit of the quarry. In order to get a better handle on the direction this side pipe took, I decided to open it up a bit.
After figuring out the direction of the pipe, and accounting for the groundhog, I repaired the hole I had dug into the middle of the pipe as well as the den entrance itself.
Will a groundhog come back here? Perhaps. Perhaps not. What is undeniable, however, is that this den is still available to a wandering possum, raccoon, or fox.
In truth, there's no shortage of holes in the woods, but only groundhogs dig them routinely; and possums and coons never dig them. Fox only dig them (or more likely, expand them a little) in winter. Considering how much work a groundhog den actually represents (800 pounds of dirt is moved on average) by a pretty small animals, it seems to me that preservation of hedgerow settes is simply respect -- and common sense if you hope to hunt frequently on the farm in question.
Do I always do a good job of repairing a sette? Truthfully, no. That said, I am getting better at it. In old age, I find I am in less of a rush to get to the next hole. When the temperature climbs past 85 degrees in summer, I suddenly remember that there is more to life than increasing its speed!
2 comments:
Patrick, do you worry much about snakes during your warm weather hunts? Just the thought of a beloved dog going into a hole here in Texas in summer gives me the creeps. I know that snakes will be out of their dens during the warm months, but they also enter burrows in search of prey. I cringe every time one of my bird dogs runs through a prairie dog town on a warm November afternoon. There's no better place in the world for finding prairie rattlers.
Thank goodness we don't have too many poisonous snakes in this region.
Copperheads are poisonous, of course, but they are overrated for toxicity. I am not sure they could actually kill a large dog. A small terrier is another questions. In any case, we have not come on one in a few thousand holes.
Rattlesnakes are (sadly) increasingly rare and are found almost exclusively in rocky areas that are hard to dig; not too many of them in farm country. I have never come across one in thousands of miles in the woods.
Water moccasins are absent from all but the southern tip of Virginia and even there are not found far from water. Again, this is a snake where the toxicity is overrated.
The one thing I worry about is black widow spiders. My Sailor is the only dog I have ever known to be bitten by one underground, but it was pretty bad. Story here >> http://terriermandotcom.blogspot.com/2006/06/acts-of-god.html For the record, Sailor died a few months later from a heart attack in the field. Story here >> http://terriermandotcom.blogspot.com/2006/09/sailor-working-terrier-has-gone-to.html Was her death related to the spider bite? Probably not, but I will never know. All I know for certain is that I miss Sailor every single day.
P.
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