I went out Sunday with Chris J. who is new to terrier work but very sensibly studying up before committing to a dog that might otherwise be a 15-year mistake. We met at the infamous "Flint Hill Country Store" and then headed off to some public land for a scout. Mountain was with me, but I left her in the truck as her stitches from her hernia operation had just come out the day before, and she has yet to "hair over".
I could tell Chris was a bit skeptical of Sailor -- she's a little dog, and in truth she does not look like much. No matter. She always proves herself soon enough. Not all that is gold glitters, and in working dogs it often does not.
The land we head out on to is an old farm that the state bought up to use as a Wildlife Management Area (WMA). Some of the land is leased back to the farmers -- cover crops like corn and alfalfa have a symbiotic relationship to the deer and turkey that are hunted on the WMA. The farm is slowly being "re-wooded" by the silly people at "Global Releaf". More on that later. Suffice it to say that we found den pipes among the tree plantings at the edge of the fields, as I knew we would.
I had scounted this area for fox settes in January and even under the snow I could tell there were enough holes to make me happy. This old farm was thick with fox tracks, but though I looked with two good locating dogs, I never did find an occupied fox sette. In my defense, this was the warmest winter I can remember, and there were not more than two good cold foxing days on which to look.
The first week of March is a bit early in the groundhog season. As a consequence, the first six or seven holes were blanks, but we headed off to a bit of land next to a point of woods where I suspected we would find an occupied hole, and sure enough we did.
Sailor poked around a bit at the mouth of a promising sette, and then slid in and opened up. She had definitely found, but the ground was pretty soft and, after a few minutes, she lost it and then found it again.
This went on for a few minutes, and I let her work it out. Groundhogs in really soft ground can almost swim through the soil. This was not the real soft stuff you get after prolonged rains, but it was soft enough for the groundhog to wall itself off from the dog in short order, and it did so at every opportunity.
Chris got a pretty good idea of how tight these pipes are -- what looked like a very large hole at the top quickly narrowed down and took a hard turn at the bottom of a two-foot drop. A small dog clearly has its uses.
After a bit of poking around, Sailor seemed to have located, and we sunk a hole down to her, a little over four feet deep. By the time we got down to her, she was a little ahead of where we started, and we decided to come in behind the critter with a second hole, which we sunk in short order. After digging the second hole and cleaning it out, we let Sailor bay it up for a bit. This is the part of terrier work I like -- the dog's genetic code exploded, tail wagging, the quarry in the pipe, the digging mostly done, the dog clearly safe from skunk.
After a bit of listening to Sailor bay it up, we pulled her from the first hole and dropped her in the second hole, where she came up fast on the groundhog's butt. In short order the groundhog tried to bolt, and it was dispatched to Hog Heaven.
This was a nice dig on a very pleasant day, with excellent soil on land that I think will be quite productive. We weighed this groundhog who was three nickels shy of 13 pounds -- a nice weight considering this animal had probably lost at least 3 pounds in hibernation.
We had finished up the dig by 10:30 or so, and we scouted around a bit more before heading back to the truck, to try our luck on a nearby farm where I thought we might be able to raise a raccoon. Variety is the spice of life and always good.
That second dig will be a story for another day, as duties other than typing now call . . .
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