I think his name is Woody. At this point, years after he first appeared, it could even be Woody II.

He is the Road Runner to my Wile E. Coyote, or perhaps I am Elmer Fudd to his Bugs Bunny.

He is a woodchuck, and he — if indeed it is a he — is a relentless nuisance, at least when it comes to this particular Braintree vegetable garden.

The nonprofit wildlife advocacy group Mass Audubon notes that the woodchuck is also called the groundhog, which he is called when he is asked once a year to shill for the woebegone town of Punxsutawney, Pa.

When living in the wild — I don’t know if an area near a giant mall is qualified to be called that — the groundhog has a life expectancy of five to six years. That’s a lot of vegetables and gardens to be devoured in a short period of time.

Woody’s distant cousin Punxsutawney Phil may have the bigger name and a cushy gig, but I’m going to bet he doesn’t eat as well as Woody. There’s no way Phil wants to be seen as fat on TV each February.

I envision Woody being unable to suppress a woodchuckian chuckle as he, en route to his meal, plows under the rubber edging and the chicken wire meant to keep him out of the garden.

My fellow gardeners will surely recognize one of Woody’s favorite tricks. He will find a tomato that is nearly ripe and take one huge bite out of it. If it doesn’t meet his exacting standards, he throws it off to the side, fit for nothing except, possibly a sauce. Then it’s off to the next tomato.

If it were only the garden, that would be one thing. But Woody is renowned for digging out burrows around the yard and then abandoning them in favor of better real estate in another area. The deep holes can be ankle-breakers.

You can knock yourself out when it comes to refilling the burrows, which often go quite far and deep underground. Woody can dig it out even faster than you can fill it in.

Mass Audubon says woodchucks are active during the day. In summer they commonly feed in the early morning and the late afternoon, spending the rest of the day sleeping or basking in the sun.

That pretty much squares with the times during the summer afternoons when I see Woody sunbathing out by the garden without a care in the world.

I don’t want to start body-shaming here but Woody no longer moves as well as he once did — he kind of resembles a brown beach ball — and his hearing isn’t all that keen.

A few times each summer, I catch him unawares and creep up behind him until I’m just a few feet away. Time to at least put the fear of God back into him.

“GET OFF MY LAWN” I yell as loudly as I can, and he usually jumps at least a foot before scurrying away. But I know he will be back to exact his revenge

I don’t want to minimize the damage that can be caused by other varmints. I have seen rabbits eat young cucumber plants all the way to the ground, and after I replanted, do it again.

When thing are really dry in a hot summer, woodchucks, squirrels, chipmunks, rabbits. deer, etc. will go after tomatoes and cukes for the moisture within. It all serves to take we gardeners down a peg or two when we think we’re getting the upper hand on Mother Nature.

There was a brief moment last summer when Susan and I believed our yard and garden had been set free by an unfortunate accident. We were driving down a busy road just a few hundred yards from our home when we noticed a large brown blob of roadkill that almost certainly was a woodchuck. Woody? And who had done the dirty deed?

Nope. He was seen soon afterward doing his appointed rounds, bigger and badder than ever. And I swear he was smirking at me from his favorite spot near the garden.

Rich Fahey can be reached at fahey.rich2@gmail.com.

Work at Boston Globe Media