My New Groundhog

The last two weeks or so the weather has been absolutely phenomenal. The days have been marked with sunshine, clear blue skies and clearly the best of all warm. The weather has remained relatively constant and the days have been ranging from fifty degrees to a near record high yesterday of seventy degrees on Saint Patrick’s Day. It feels so great to be outside and actually feel the warmth of the sun with a shirt and shorts on. The signs of spring are all emerging from the grass becoming greener to track, soccer, and tennis teams playing outside. Another one of these signs of spring however has emerged quite noticeably in my own back yard.

And that is my groundhog. I first saw him last fall, but only occasionally (once in September and the other time in early November if I remember correctly). At that time this groundhog was huge it looked like a brown dog when I first glanced at him, nearly forty pounds of brown- furred groundhog meat. The outdoorsmen I am, the day after watching him for a few minutes, I decided to follow the path that I thought he had followed. After getting to the spot where I first saw him I tracked where I thought he had went the other day and lo and behold after a quick walk I found a mound of fresh dirt and a hole leading into the ground on the side of this mound. It didn’t take much to conclude that this was the entrance to groundhog’s home. However, that was the last I saw of my groundhog for the winter.

But with these last two weeks I have seen this same groundhog everyday after I get home from track practice. After a quick observation I noticed that my neighbor, the groundhog, had lost some serious weight and that every time I saw him he was looking for a source of green plant growth, which is almost completely absent in my yard at that time. So for the last couple of days I’ve been saving the potato skins and lettuce scraps from my family’s meals and have been putting it out near the groundhog’s hole for him to eat. The next day after the first time I put these vegetable scraps out for him I noticed him gorging himself on some lettuce leaves.

Who knows, maybe he will become like a dog in a backyard and I will have one popular pet when Groundhog’s Day 2010 comes around I hope (as long as I keep feeding him the lettuce that he likes so much anyways).