Wildlife Watching Wednesday: The Garden-Raiding Groundhog

By: Tom Berg

Spring will be here before we know it, and gardening will be on the minds of many people. One of the arch-enemies of local gardeners, however, is the groundhog. These pesky rodents are also called woodchucks, whistle-pigs, ground-pigs and even Canada marmots. They are actually part of the marmot family, and they are common throughout the eastern United States and Canada.

Although they have been popularized by the annual Groundhog Day celebration in early February, groundhogs are a genuine pest around flower gardens and vegetable gardens. Since they are mostly vegetarians, they eat grass, clover and all kinds of tender leaves and young plants. In fact, they can eat more than a pound of vegetation per day during the summertime months.

One of their favorite foods are leaves from the mulberry tree. Surprisingly, groundhogs have good climbing skills and they can climb mulberry trees to reach the tasty leaves. But they also like the leaves and stems of many flowers in the flower garden, like zinnias, black-eyed susans, coneflowers and many others. They even eat pungent-smelling plants like marigolds. They can also be destructive in the vegetable garden.  Bean plants, peppers, lettuce, tomatoes – almost nothing in the garden is safe from hungry groundhogs.

As summer progresses towards fall, groundhogs begin converting the food they eat directly into fat. They must store lots of fat to survive the winter as they hibernate underground. Groundhogs are great diggers and they dig extensive burrows. The underground burrows are used for sleeping, escaping predators, raising their young and hibernating.

Even though groundhogs can be a nuisance to humans, it is important to remember they are one of our native species of wildlife and they have a role to play in the local ecosystem. As they dig their burrows they unwittingly help aerate the soil, which is good for the plants growing nearby. Abandoned groundhog burrows are also used by many other animals that either can’t dig for themselves or are poor diggers, like opossums, skunks, chipmunks and snakes, just to name a few.

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