The porcupines dug a mineshaft under my fence last night. They have been digging in from the empty plot next door nearly every night for the last 3 weeks. Apart from eating all the freesia and sparaxis bulbs that I forgot to lift and store until autumn, they have eaten nothing. They trample through the patch of cocktail tomatoes, yet don't eat them. I suspect that they are really after my neighbour's magnificent crop of giant tomatoes on the other side of a vibracrete wall but haven't figured out that they should be digging under his wall and not mine.
Every morning before letting the dogs out, I have to do fence patrol to make sure that Monty can't get through the latest hole. He is a real Houdini, and just loves to escape and run up and down on the rocks at the lighthouse for hours, while I stand like an idiot, calling him, knowing it's futile.
The latest excavation is about 3 feet deep. The concrete blocks I lined up along the fence withstood the digging to form a bridge that any engineer would be proud of. My master plan was that they would sink gently in tandem with the mining, but it was not to be. We have sunk a length of wire fencing into the ground but this is no deterrent and merely encourages deeper digging. About a cubic metre of sand now covers 4 square metres of lawn, making it impossible to refill the hole which is now beginning to resemble a sinkhole.
To add insult to injury, they puncture the irrigation system at the same time, necessitating numerous joins, and making it look rather like a string of beads. I'm reluctant to trap the porcies because this causes them tremendous stress, and as there are two of them, I wouldn't really like them to be separated. It is only the danger they pose to our dogs that is a real problem. I'll just have to wait until they get bored and find a better place for dinner. Hope it's soon!
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