This morning, I was brushing my teeth, looking out the window as I often do, and saw something unusual out toward the back. It was a large mammal, dark brown, stout, low to the ground. My still half-asleep mind searched to figure out what this might be. A large dog? A small bear?

Yes, you guessed it, it was the evil javelina. It lumbered off into the brush as I was calling Brad, but fortunately he got there in time to see its partner following behind. They were running off from having a drink at the water hole we put in for the animals. Silly us.

While we’ve seen plenty of damage from javelinas in the last two years, this was the first ones I’ve actually seen on our property. They were surprisingly large. All morning, I shook my head in amazement at having actually seen them.

As you may remember, last year, the unseen javelinas did quite a lot of damage to our garden. They ate tomatoes, watermelon, and sweet potato greens, as well as ripping up a lot of expensive insect netting.

Two weeks or so again, we had another visit; it was too depressing to write about at the time. They ate all my tomato starts. After nursing these along from seed for five months and just getting them outside, it was pretty awful. (The good news is that a few have come back, and I still have some starts in the house as well.)

After that, I did some more serious research on the problem and determined that an electric fence was the best solution. So last week, we put one in. It’s only about 10 inches high, and since we’ve put it in, we haven’t had any problems.

In the course of my research, I also found that javelinas are drawn by food outside (especially dog food or bird seed) and by water. Ok, affirmative on that.