She watched her husband as he triumphantly came up the walkway to the front porch, his long range varmint rifle slung across his shoulder.
“I got two!”
“Two what?”
“Groundhogs. I got into position and one stood up. I nailed him at one hundred yards. A couple minutes later, another stood up. I got him too. Same spot.”
“Don’t take your boots off yet; your hunt’s not over.”
She went to the garage, returned, took his rifle and handed him a shovel. “Don’t come back until you’ve found them.”
“Found who?”
The wife sighed, “My husband, who thinks he’s Daniel Boone. Listen, those two groundhogs you shot in the same spot? In human lingo, we call them parents. Whoever you shot first was a either the mom or the dad. The second one was the other parent coming out to check on the mate. You killed them both. It’s late Spring. Groundhogs have their babies in the burrow and they will die with no one to look after them. Like I said, don’t come home without them.”
And so, years ago, began one man’s odyssey that eventually resulted in Sabrina and I being handed our first set of eye-closed baby groundhogs.
Begrudging the task at first, the man quickly came to a place of amazement as he dug out the burrow deeper and deeper: blind passages, birthing chambers, lavatories, look-out holes, escape routes were there, along with inside earthen dams should heavy rains flood the burrow affording the animals precious moments to escape and survive.
One way or another, the six were soon in our care. Problem: we had never dealt with baby groundhogs before, nor was there any information on Google to tell us how. What to do? In desperation, we look at charts and found to our surprise that groundhogs were taxonomically not far-off from grey squirrels. Them, we knew.
We began cautiously with feeding, caging and stimulation, and to our amazement, each of them thrived.
Soon it came time to release them into an enclosed outdoor cage. Question: Once fully released, how could they ever know how to accomplish the complexity of burrow construction necessary to keep them safe?
Our fear proved unnecessary. We set them into a secure patch of land not far from a creek, went down and called for them twice a day. As we were the first beings they had seen when their eyes opened, we were ‘safe’, we were mom and dad. [I should here add that G’hogs quickly lose this sense of trust as they ‘go wild.’ They never ‘tame.’]
But, a final question: how do they know how to build this elaborate architecture? ‘Instinct’ is the common answer, but in truth it’s a non-answer. If that settled decision means anything then why don’t migratory song-birds dig burrows, or G’hogs make nests in the limbs or walk south for the winter?
Here is a final question, in our on-going quest to understand what motivates – and thus to help – the babies in our care, feathered or legged, help me with this one: I am soon to release two rehabbed G’hogs, neither of whom seem to much like dirt. Help!
