been chasin’ this ‘Blur’, and her brother, for about a month now.

before that it was their parents (I presume), who seem to have grown wiser (and thus, more distant!)

finally got her, ‘Blur’, in a big big net that we had laid out for her, along her favorite escape route out of the garden.

the garden. and life.

an Oasis of Song for birds, frogs, toads, lizards, skinks, snakes, turtles, hawks, owls, mice, squirrels and the occasional chipmunk, skunk, raccoon, deer — and now, rabbits! (the Year of the Rabbit came early for the Valley.)

and did I say,”Gophers”?

fortunately the gophers are manageable, and the Deer are knowing and respectful — VERY rarely walking in for a nibble. the hawks and owls and snakes almost keep the gophers in check, and hand’s down keep the squirrels away.

the gopher families became manageable this year because we downsized our garden tenfold, and moved it down from the (gopher-thick) hillside to a slab of sandstone just outside our back door. a couple feet of old horse manure and sand and clay soil piled on top of bottomless sandstone — allowing us to, with daily action, keep the persistent gophers at bay.

nearby this garden, and the (now) relocated ‘Blur’ Rabbit, we have three little garden plots, not on sandstone, which are protected by ‘Rabbit Mesh’, in fact the netting we finally captured ‘Blur’ Rabbit in.

the Rabbit Mesh also keeps out the Brown Towhees, joyous birds who love to eat greens, particularly the young bean, squash, cucumber and other seedings in their early growth stage, eat them right down to the ground. (‘Blur’ Rabbit consistently did that with our new Eggplants, even though they were a foot tall!)

for the gophers my favorite recipe is the most effective — Gopher Snakes. every week or so I find a Gopher or Garden Snake crawling across the nearby fields, and I bring them ‘home; to the garden, and stick them in one of the main gopher ‘highways’!

I could probably do that with our King Snakes and CoachWhip snakes too, but I hate to disturb our King Snake friends, and the CoachWhips seem to resent my picking them up. (they bite me …)

and the (large) Rattlesnakes never seem to have the right attitude for the job …

this dense (kale, cabbage, squash, chard) section of the main garden is where ‘Blur’ Rabbit used to hide when she saw me after her. I had to get the hose, and water the area down thoroughly, or else make a lot of ruckus running about, with say a broom, before she would go zipping up the hillside, or around the other side of the garden, or elsewhere, at ‘Blur’ velocities.

today we were ready for her — she had ‘axed’ a beautiful Eggplant the night before.

when Megumi saw her run into the garden, I followed a moment later — accompanied by the broom and an ‘armada’ of boistrous shouts.

and she ran straight into the VAST array of netting laid out for her.

a minute later, she was all wrapped up in about ten-by-twenty-feet of thick nylon-like netting — and tossed, very ingraciously, into the back of the pickup for a ride to the neighboring wildlife preserve.

['Burl Rabbit' effigy photo used here, to preserve the dignity of our infamous (and up-ended) 'Blur' Rabbit, whom Megumi-san could not resist tickling all the way down the long road to her new home ...]