dewy grass
wet-bellied woodchuck
good morning
I come across woodchuck/groundhog holes in Green-Wood with some frequency. (Good to keep at least one eye on the ground there, lest you miss a grass-clutching moth or a one-way trip into the underworld…) But I hadn’t seen an actual Marmota monax for some time until last weekend.
A typical sighting…. They are out and about now, foraging as the acorns, hickories, walnuts, and crab apples fall.
“Whistlepig” is a name you come across in the literature. Has anybody out there in readership land ever heard one whistle?
Last Monday, I had a close encounter. Turned out the entrance to the den was right here.
Your nose would be a bit dirt-smutched if you lived underground, too.
Anthropomorphizing here, but this strikes me as a skeptical look, and, well, wouldn’t that be justified?
Backyard and Beyond 
Ground hog, land beaver, woodchuck, gopher, pasture pig, whistle pig, varmint. I love them all! Every spring there’s a new chuck under our potting shed. One year it was a mama and she had 4 babies. What a treat!