Blessed by the Potato

We have something living under the front porch of our house. I don’t know what it is… originally I was thinking some small burrowing animal, since the hole was pretty small through the winter and early spring. But recently there’s been a lot of extra activity around that hole that makes me wonder. A few days ago, the extension cord we have plugged into the outdoor socket near the hole was dragged in, and rather forcefully at that: the cord had been pulled partly out of the socket, and it’s a pretty tight socket. I couldn’t think of any animal that would be very interested in taking an extension cord into their burrow: it’s not a very cozy object, it doesn’t shred into bedding well, it’s not edible, and it’s not even very good for lining the walls or blocking the door. Then, the hole was widened. Significantly. The dirt was cleared clean down to the concrete underneath the porch, and the 2×4 pieces of wood used to help hold the porch up were pushed out, all together making the hole nearly 10X the size it was just a few weeks ago. That could be due to whatever creature lives under there being big, or it could be that something else has tried to go after it down there…

Right now, the leading theory is that a large rabbit is living under there, with a raccoon or groundhog as a close second & third theory. In a distant fourth place is the thought that we have gnomes living under our deck. It explains the need for power, and the clean swept concrete. If I start seeing piles of copper bolts piling up outside the burrow, then I’ll know it’s gnomes (and also that they’re skilling up engineering, possibly to make a mechanostrider).