Low Impact Hunting

This old truck at Nick's is slowly getting consumed by Virginia Creeper.


Hit a farm today, but after two hours in the field I had only succeeded in finding a lot of empty holes and getting myself soaked from the waist down due to the fact that the vegetation was very high and wet from a thunderstorm the night before. The fields themselves were off-limits as they have been planted in barley right up to the edge and the crop is tall if still green. In three weeks that barely should be gone, and then corn or soy will probably follow.

I decided to pack it in on this wet farm and head over to Nick's place where I knew the fields would be shorter and dryer. Pulling into Nick's I could see that the first cut of hay was already starting to come off. The hay is coming off at MackIntosh's farm too -- big round bales tossed across the fields like pieces of candy on a pool table.

As I was unpacking the tools, the farm manager came up and we chatted a bit. Apparently he knows a lady that wants her groundhogs gotten rid of, and I am only too happy to help. I asked him what the long wide strip of purple flowers was, and he said it's Hairy Vetch -- it fixes nitrogen in the soil, and they are growing it for seed. It's a pretty flower that makes for a pretty field, that's for sure.

I mentioned that corn prices were going up due to the push for more ethanol production. and he said chicken feed was way up too -- he was now charging $3 a pound for free range chicken. While we were talking, the farm manager pointed out two groundhogs on the edge of the woods several hundred yards up the way. Ah good! It might not be a blank day after all.

Mountain had been free while we talked, and as I finished the conversation, she came down from the flinty ridge where she had clearly been to ground in a very dark earth. Follow me, she seemed to be saying, and so I did.

Mountain slid into a rocky pipe about 50 yards up the hedge, and I could hear her moving stones, and then there was a short bay and more moving stones. There was a groundhog in there, but the stones were slipping and she was having a hard time catching up to it. I probed with the bar ahead of Mountain and found the pipe, and sunk a two-foot hole to it. Mountain came out and re-entered the sette where I had sunk the hole, and after about 15 minutes of digging and poking on both our parts, we finally found where the pipe exited the hole I had dug.

The groundhog had filled in the entire pipe with stones, and the only sure sign there was something down there was the fact that even with Mountain out of the hole and tied up, I could hear something moving rocks underground. This damn groundhog was a stone mason!

I pulled more rocks out of the hole until it seemed as if it was more-or-less clear. I then shoved some more rocks up the other side of the pipe so the groundhog could not bolt up into there. I then kicked in my shovel, as best I could, to block a bolt out of the main hole itself. That accomplished, I barred into ground just ahead of the location where I thought the groundhog would be, and I broke through at about two feet.

I had just started to posthole down into the rocky soil, when something hit the shovel blade blocking the main pipe. It thumped it hard again, and then, before I could even set the posthole diggers down, the groundhog had the gap at the top of the shovel opened up, and it was up and out, and running fast down the slope. It was a big one, and I was pleased to see it as I have hunted a little too hard on this farm in the past. Mountain strained against the end of the leash, and I went over to let her off to chase the groundhog to ground again despite the fact that I had already decided to let this one go.

I filled in the holes as best I could (there was less fill than hole), and we headed down to the place where the farm manager had spied two groundhogs on the edge of the forest. Mountain found again in another very rocky sette, but she could not get up to it. Instead of digging up this sette, I decided to call it a day with one bolted, three seen, and none killed.

We'll be back; it's a long summer and there's no hurry to bleed this farm white. Secretly, I'm more than a little happy that groundhogs are back on this farm.



Mountain slides into a pipe near where two groundhogs were spotted.