Den Repair

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!