How much round could a groundhog grind if a groundhog could grind ground and so could you call that grind ground round?
Now that we’ve got that out of the way, let’s talk about the woodchucks in our back yard. By the way, woodchuck and groundhog are different names for the same big rodent that can feast on whatever’s growing in your garden.
Now that it looks like our pesky robin has retired from beating on our windows for whatever reason, we’ll probably return the black window film we got to cover them.
Now we’ve got a completely different critter visiting us—a family of marmots, groundhogs, woodchucks, whistle pigs (they emit a high-pitched whistle when alarmed), giant rats munching veggies in our back yard. They remind Sena of meerkats, so I guess you could call their home Groundhog Great House.
It’s actually a little family of momma woodchuck and her two pups, who are almost as big as she is. Their den is close to the flower garden. They tend to feed in the early or latter part of the day and we caught them on film yesterday afternoon. They’re pretty skittish and tend to freeze and scamper at the drop of a leaf.
When we lived at a previous house several years ago, there was a big woodchuck that lived in back part of our yard. One evening it was standing up stock still and mesmerized by something in the sky. It looked like a statue of a woodchuck. There were big gray clouds blotting out the sun. It just so happened that a big storm was coming and not long after there was a severe storm warning.
I snapped the picture of the woodchuck on May 2, 2018 and the National Weather Service has a record of hail reports in Iowa City on that date. I don’t know how much evidence there is for the theory that some animals can sense changes in atmospheric pressure, so it could have been a coincidence.
Anyway, the family of woodchucks in our backyard are more concerned about filling their stomachs than checking barometric pressures or looking up the weather reports on their tiny screen TVs in burrows which can run for 50 feet, by the way. They dig like crazy. For now, they munching on the wild stuff and turn up their noses at the catmint.
I suppose some think woodchucks look cute, but they can carry a variety of diseases including rabies most commonly, tularemia (rabbit fever), Lyme disease, hantavirus and others.
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