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How much wood could a woodchuck chuck if a woodchuck could chuck wood? Of course you can think of this as one sighting in his or her 22LR. Neat way to prevent damage, expenses of reclaiming the land the beasts ruined, replace cattle or a horse who stepped in a woodchuck burrow and broke his leg. Unfortunately the only one who is interested in a dead rodent is the raven. They will eat anything.

Thank you for telling us about the flowers breaking ground – it warms my heart to hear such news.
I’m in Los Angeles, CA – no little crocuses here.

Thanks — NOW I understand – to think I reached 75 yrs old and didn’t KNOW this.

One of my favorite targets. Little vermin (actually they’re not so little) can eat up to 35 bushels of soybeans per animal per year. If you see one, there are at least six you’re not seeing at the moment. 6 varmints x35 bushels per year = 210 bushels. At roughly ten dollars a bushel that’s $2,100.00 a year that they eat up just in beans. That’s just one family unit, there may be several families living on the verge of those fields so the cost of feeding groundhogs (marmots) can be staggeringly high. There’s a reason why they’re called “hogs”. A few families of woodchucks (another name for the same animal) living in proximity to agricultural fields can cost as much as a new car every year. That doesn’t even cover the damage that their burrows do.

Ol’ Puxatawney Phil is safe, he’s a kept critter that isn’t out doing any damage and I have no desire to see anything happen to him. It’s his cousins that are a problem and they’re not safe from me at all.

Why am I telling you this? Because many of you see ol’ Phil here and think he’s so cute, why would anyone want to kill something like that? Now you know why.

Indeed. The cross-quarter days have always felt like the times the seasons are beginning to shift. Not so much “end of winter,” more of a period during which the two seasons mingle, the coming one starting to show itself.

Which it is to me. The coldest average low temp ended last week and the average highs and lows start rising by about 2 degrees per week now.
I saw that the early flowers had broken ground just yesterday.
Lughnasadh, 08/07/18 this year, also works for summer. Almost exactly when our average highs and lows start dropping,

The point would be if the winter equinox was mid-winter, then Feb 2 is the end of winter.

It has been cloudy and snowy for two weeks in west Michigan and clear and bright in Wisconsin. Does that mean Wisconsin gets six more weeks of winter and west Michigan gets early spring?