It is that time of year again, spring has sprung and the critters are crawling out of their winter dens!  Woodchucks, groundhogs, ground grizzlies or whistle pigs, what ever you want to call them they too are starting to show themselves.    The little buggers have love on their minds and are beginning to run around in the fields and warm spring sunshine. 

     Last Saturday, my oldest son took the first chuck of the season from the field behind our house.  They have began their ritual of digging borroughs all around the hillside behind our house, not to mention a nice hole behind my back shed!  He dropped this one at 60 yards while it was moving between holes.  A nice beginning to the season of fence patrol, as he harvested one of three sighted this week, the other two were yesterday morning by my wife.  I was asleep and she didn’t want to wake me so they live yet another day.

     This morning I sat watching with a nice hot cup of coffee and the trusty .22 mag by my side as I glassed the field.  The only critters I saw moving were five deer along the back edge of the field and about 2 dozen bufflehead ducks in the back pond.  Still it was a good morning to sit and watch nature.  

     Besides that, my new incentive to get rid of these little ground destroyers is a new groundhog harvesting contest on Talk Hunting’s forum.  The scoring is for the biggest chuck measured while on its back from nose tip to tail tip plus the mesurement from front paw tip to front paw tip.  Biggest measurement wins, well wins nothing except bragging rights and eliminating a nuisance from your yard or fields.