Bob Harrison and his wife, Mandy, have lived in their Rochester Avenue home for 30 years, having fallen in love with the view that stretches all the way to the Fraser River, the flat, expansive back yard and the creek flowing beside the house.
Never in those 30 years did they expect to be dealing with a pest the likes of the chafer beetle.
In the past few months the Harrisons have watched their carefully tended lawn turn into an apocalyptic battle scene - the crows pecking away at great chunks of grass, turning it into bubbled balls of turf, and the raccoons laying waste to entire swaths, nosing the sod up and rolling it back with nary a root in sight.
"We had a beautiful lawn here for years and years," Harrison said, shaking his head as he surveyed the damage in his back yard.
And after months of trying to battle the chafer beast, Harrison is throwing up his hands in defeat.
"What do we do with this? It's totally ruined," he said of the more than 6,000 sq. ft. yard.
The couple's grandson did a bit of online research for them and came up with coyote urine as a possible antidote, so Harrison picked up a small bottle from an outdoors store in Bellingham. He sprinkled some on a test patch of grass and tied a urine-soaked rag to a stake that he set out in another area.
"That night the raccoons came back, sniffed around - it didn't bother them at all," Harrison said. "The next night the crows came back as well."
When he pulled out a magnifying glass to read the bottle's fine print and discovered coyote urine was used by hunters to attract big game - including bears - Harrison figured it wasn't the best plan of attack for his back yard.
Next he tried an expensive pesticide from a nearby gardening store, also to no avail. Harrison has also looked into applying nematodes but at $350 to cover his large back yard he's not sure he wants to take the risk, particularly when he found more than 100 white grubs squirrelling around under just one square foot of lawn.
The ordeal has the Harrisons puzzling over what to do next.
"I would like to just leave it," Mandy said, hoping the niggling insects will have their fill this year and then move on.
Harrison still holds a sliver of hope for a peaceful summer out back, but acknowledges that ripping up the damaged sod and replacing it with new grass or seed could very well land them in the same beetle battle next year.
In the meantime, they're also keeping an eye on the front yard, which has somehow escaped the chafer invasion; Mandy figures the large trees and longer grass out front prevent the flying beetles from landing to lay their eggs.
And they're also looking into alternative methods of engaging with the enemy, possibly saying good-bye to their grass and checking into clover, Mandy said, because "maybe the roots aren't as tasty?"
@spayneTC
