this is my woodchuck, known locally as a groundhog. they're members of the marmot family. she has 4 babies, now about half as big as her. they live in my ReStore yard. i think i'm going to have a contest to name her and her tribe. i usually spot her in the evenings, after the store is closed, and people aren't wandering all over her yard. most of the heaps of stuff that used to cover the yard are gone now, so she doesn't have as many places to hide as she once did, but she doesn't seem to mind too much. i wonder if she likes carrots....?
9 comments:
I suspect she'll love carrots.
As for a name: how about Martha? Martha the Marmot.
As for loving her and her brood - remember that it can grow larger. You could end up with a marmot village.
gary - i'm not too worried about them taking over. we get a lot of traffic through the yard all week, during which time they disappear, and woodchucks not particularly sociable, so they don't usually live in groups. there's a big, empty field next door, right on the creek bank, with trees along the creek edge. it'll probably look more attractive to most of them as they look for their own 'pads'. but you can't take the bush out of the girl. it pleases me so much to have wild things in my yard, plunk in the middle of the city. the deer wander up from the creek in the evenings too.
i keep forgetting to bring carrots.
Martha... it could stick.
Part of the fields and woods behind the house where I grew up contained a usually abandoned 9 hole golf course. There was one spot where I'd practice sitting very quietly waiting for the woodchucks to pop out of the multiple holes they'd dug themselves. They knew I was there but their acceptance of me always made the wait worthwhile. I can well understand the delight you feel.
i had no idea a woodchuck was also known as a groundhog. i learned something today.
i think, as such, they are rather the opposite of mermaids.
aerial is a fine name for a mermaid.
so a great name for a groundhog would be pomme de terre, which means... i think... apple of the earth.
or in english, potato.
su - the earth of the yard here is very gravelly, and there are still little oases of stuff i haven't got sorted and cleared away yet, so she seems to prefer hiding under heaps to digging. at least, i haven't come across any burrow holes yet.
sera - pomme de terre and her 4 little potato nuggets! i like it! till a friend did some surfing for info about them, i didn't know groundhogs were woodchucks either... or that they were a type of marmot.
little potato nuggets. perfect!
its nice to see signs of the 'wild'. if the human race were sudenly to die out they can have the whole place repopulated in a matter of days...think we are parked on top of their territory...
What a delight to have a woodchuck family next door – How much wood could she chuck? - I bet more wood than all the wood in your ReStore if your woodchuck could chuck wood.
Best wishes
sera - and they're a lovely golden brown!
claire - it's a good thing they're not as nasty about
'interlopers' as we tend to be. she scolds if anyone gets too close to her babies, but she seems quite content to share her turf with the 2-leggers she encounters.
lindsay - i wish she would chuck some wood. at present, we're filling the 10th disposal bin with damaged and useless stuff left behind by the previous management. these bins are the size of a semi-truck's B-train.
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