One of my customers thought the same thing until he complained to me that his "L" head MTD was overheating. After removing the blower housing, I found a mouse condo built out of drier sheets. I guess they loose their effectiveness so I have him using mothballs now. They have a mothball sachel at Wally like you hang in your closet, works perfectly on the fuel line next to the engine. Nothing to laugh about, I have replaced more engines this year due to overheating, don't forget these are, for the most part air cooled. Here's a Craftsman LT1000 that I was able to save, he had lost the head gasket however.

Update: Last night as I was watering my squash I thought I saw something moving: that something was a groundhog!! It had attempted to get my largest butternut and had already eaten the leaves and young fruit of one cucumber bush. I switched the hose to 'jet' and let him have it. It went leaping across the grass and out of the yard through a hole which has been left open in the east fence because of a tree. I don't think I can close it but are ground hogs smart? Will he realize that he is not welcome and stay away? There are lots of things for him to eat like fallen apples and other berries. UUGGHH!!

One year later, and time for a report. In the past couple of months, I've caught eight fox squirrels, and moved them out of reach. That's about half what I caught last year. I have had zero squirrel garden damage this year, BTW. The fact that I've caught only eight (about half that of last year) means to me that I had a serious overpopulation of them last year, and that culling made a big difference. But as expected, the population grew in the spring, though never got as bad as it was last year. We had a very wet spring, and the winter acorn crop was enormous. As a result, I only caught a few in May and June. They just weren't that hungry for my bait. But just in the last two days I caught FIVE! Wham. Wham. Wham. Wham. Wham. The nuts are running out, I guess. As of now, I go outside, and I hardly see any of them at all in my yard. As I've learned, the repopulation/dispersal rate of urban squirrels is very slow. In a given year, these squirrels don't just migrate from one yard to the next. They just don't do it. I consider them cleaned out of my yard until next spring, when I'll dust off the trap and snatch a few more.

I've not posted on this thread for quite a while, but we've had lots of visitors, many visible through the kitchen window and within easy shot of the camera. This morning there were 4 deer, two does and two youths, wandering across the back field as I poured my coffee. They looked like they were wading through some kind of weird pink foam since the fluffy red-purple grass seedheads (I think purple love-grass, Eragrostis spectabilis) were covered with dew. They passed within about 30 feet of the veggie garden and showed no interest in it at all. We have had a wren visiting regularly - I saw it perched on the compost fence today, but these photo was from early in the week on my half-dead Kousa dogwood outside the window. After preening fairly vigorously for a bit, s/he still looked amazingly ruffled. The same morning a pair of goldfinches were visiting to eat seeds on plants I haven't cut back or deadheaded since I've been gone much of the month, including Scabiosa Butterfly Blue and Centaurea dealbata. This morning the female hummer who views the back garden as her territory was doing her best to chase everyone away: an immature cardinal (an unusual visitor here), some of the flycatchers, and a couple of song sparrows. Here she is visiting the monkshood between chasing her neighbors away. I was a bit surprised since these are so toxic to us, but they don't seem to bother her. The flowers are so large compared to her tiny size that she can fit her entire head in.