Four Groundhogs and Five Digs

I joined up with Beth and Jeff, who has a very good looking young dog from Beth's Kennel by the name of Dickens. It was an overcast day with a sharp wind and temperatures that ranged around 40 degrees but felt much colder on the hills.

Mountain found a groundhog in a hedgerow, and Jeff and I dug it out in short order while Millie worked another groundhog up the hedge that eventually managed to dig away in the very soft soil. Sailor found in a small pipe under a mass of dry sticks that was a bit like a beaver dam, and we dug down to this one in short order as well, with Mountain doing the final bit of extraction work.

Groundhogs number three and four were found in the same sette -- Sailor working away at one on one side of the pipe, and Millie working the other on the other side of the pipe. The two groundhogs ended up pushed up one behind the other in the pipe, with a dog on each end -- quick work and another shallow dig in soft earth, albeit with a net of finger-roots mixed in.

Millie had the fourth groundhog firmly by the seat of the pants, which was good luck as we weren't expecting it to be there!

All of the groundhogs we located were small -- one-year-olds that had lost a third of their body weight during hibernation.

At the end of the day, we watched a turkey vulture hunt low over the field, playing in the wind, its bright red head quite visible. Jeff guessed that it must be scenting one of the dead groundhogs we had left out for scavenging fox, and sure enough in the gloamin (and while we dug down six feet to extract Millie who was hard at work on the 5th critter of the day a bit farther up the field) we watched it settle down for its feast.

Everything is recycled, one way or another.

Millie was extracted from the pipe with the help of a snare (they work on dogs too!), and we finished repairing the den just as the last light faded into blackness.

All in all, an excellent day, and we left some in the ground to come back to another day. Nothing wrong with that.

The dogs were pretty tuckered out, the pups got an eyeful, and everyone had a few sore muscles at the end of the day. About as good as it gets.