Blue Ridge Country - September/October 2013 - 10

from the
farm

text and photos by elizabeth hunter

Groundhog Days
trying the same thing again and again, as bill murray did in
the movie, can be just as frustrating with a real groundhog.

Above: A baited trap awaits a groundhog. Top right: wren nest with eggs; Lower right: wrens almost ready to fledge.

Cantaloupe, sweet Corn, lettuce,
peas, string beans, strawberries,
cukes, peaches and vanilla extract.
According to the Havahart
company, one of whose traps I have
set down near my garden shed, the
above are a groundhog’s 10 favorite
foods. So the morning after I spotted
a humongous groundhog grazing in
the grassy path between my squash
and asparagus, I went shopping – for
item #1 on the list. I’d had success
trapping a groundhog several years
earlier, when I bought the trap. Should
be easy, I thought, since it’s obvious
from the muddy, newly tunneled
opening, where he is living. Perhaps,
like the one percent, the den under
the garden shed is only one of his residences. But it’s definitely the one he’s
using to gain access to my garden.
This groundhog doesn’t look like
the brightest light in the firmament.
Small, flattened head. Dull, suspicious
10 | BlueRidgeCountry.com

eyes. Enormous furry brown body
ending in an afterthought, a ridiculous
short tail barely visible behind his capacious rump as he scuttles back to his
bunker. His hearing, though, is acute,
and he’s proving to be resourceful.
Also disrespectful. The trap’s presence
does not spook him. Through binoculars, I watched him burrow alongside
and partly under it when it blocked
access to his hideaway. The minute he
finished clearing the way he scurried
over to some volunteer sunflowers
growing outside a hogwire cage I’d
put around the largest of them, and
knocked one over. In no time flat it
disappeared – all those large, scratchy
leaves, the stalk – into the maw of his
mouth, a green bouquet on a fastmoving conveyor belt.
Sunflowers do not appear on
Havahart’s groundhog favorite foods
list. But I’m here to tell you that if
cantaloupe is bait in a trap and unpro-

tected sunflowers are growing nearby,
even a stupid groundhog knows which
to go for.
This is the first time in a few years
I’ve had a groundhog problem. Or
maybe it’s just the first time in a few
years that I have known that the
problem I had was a groundhog
problem. Probably I have been blaming
deer, whose sharply defined footprints
are everywhere, for groundhog
damage, even though deer are
browsers. If a few tender leaves are
missing from the raspberries’ new
growth, deer did it. But they’re unlikely
to be responsible when a healthy stand
of sunflowers is reduced to short leafless stalks. Groundhogs are efficiency
personified. And voraciousness. The
electric company could employ them
to keep rights of way cleared if they
seeded them in sunflowers and clover.
Even before the groundhog
appeared, I was having wildlife prob-

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Blue Ridge Country - September/October 2013

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