Digging on the Dogs

A few pictures from yesterday.

The day started off fine right out of the box with Garvey locating. Yes sir, Garvey the Green dog located, and when we found him he was in the earth baying it up! Yahoo!

This was a pretty straightforward pop-hole dig of about two feet, and we accounted for a mid-sized groundhog out of it. Garvey and Bean are still a bit tentative, but they clearly are getting the hang of it.

Mountain of course, had buggered off again at the end of this dig in order to locate something new. And she did. When I found her about 40 minutes later, she had clearly been deep in black earth. Thinking I knew where she might have been (based on her location when found) I went to check a rocky den located on a down slope in a jumble of downed trees, but the soil there was the wrong color, and the dogs were not interested. We moved on .

We checked a lot of empty settes along the forest line and in a couple of hedgerows, but found nothing. The weather was beginning to look a little dodgy.

Mountain wandered off again, looking for what she knows is out there. When we caught up with her, she was in the ground and baying it up. She was clearly hard on it, and we downed tools, cut away some multi-flora rose and vine, and popped in on another groundhog. I snared this one, holding it and Mountain for a quick picture before letting it go.

A bit farther on Mountain found again, this time under an enormous boulder that butted up against a tree. The groundhog was in this fortress, but we managed to bang a hole into the side of it anyway. Right about this time the rain started to come down for real, and we decided to give this groundhog good leave and call it a day.

The dogs leashed up we headed back to the vehicles, arriving back not totally soaked, but pretty shy of dry. All the dogs were in fine shape, and before we were too far down the road, the rain began to come down hard, dropping 3 inches overnight.
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