We have been rather entertained by our resident groundhogs under the junk pile of late.

The grog actually managed to drag some of the tarp down into the den entrance!

This tarp is one of several that I found when cleaning the junk off this pile of wood. They had clearly been used to cover and protect the wood, but had been blown aside and torn apart by the elements, along with all sorts of things being tossed into the area. Torn up as they were, I was still able to use them to cover the wood pile a bit, but the groundhogs are taking advantage of the deteriorated state. They are trying to gather it into their den for nesting material.

Last night, I cleaned it up a bit and tucked the tarp under some boards.

This is how I found it this morning.

I was able to see the groundhog in action through the living room window.

That little bugger is really working at it! 😀

I put together the videos I took from the window, too. 🙂

These next photos were taken after the video was made.

It got quite a lot of that tarp down and into the den entrance!

In taking this photo, I noticed something I hadn’t seen before.

There is now a third entrance to the den in the back of the pile!

I cleaned up and tucked things away again. It should be interesting to see how long this lasts.

While I was working in a nearby beet bed (which will be in my next post), I could hear the grog trying to drag a corner of the orange trap around the back, too.

The gravel you see at the bottom of the photo is from the second entrance to the den.

I don’t think you can see it in the photo above, but there is the nose of a grog in their main entrance. It was watching me.

You’ll notice the gravel is different in this photo. I took advantage of their hard work and used it. I’ll be posting about that after I’ve processed the photos I took.

We seem to have made a truce with the groundhogs. I’m relieved, because we were getting to the point of taking some rather permanent steps. Something I won’t even consider right now, as they are nesting, and I don’t want to end up depriving babies of their mother. The cayenne pepper and covers are working, overall (more on that in my next post), and they seem content with eating the bird seed, grazing on whatever they’re finding in the grass, and leaving our garden beds alone now. From what I’ve been able to find about them, they don’t actually like to have overlapping territory, so if there are any babies, they will not stick around once they are big enough to live on their own.

For all the predictions of rain we’ve been getting, I don’t think we’ll actually get anything of substance, so I will be applying more cayenne pepper this evening. If it rains, well, I’ll just have to do it again.

The Re-Farmer