{"id":8725,"date":"2007-04-16T09:22:00","date_gmt":"2007-04-16T13:22:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/nuxx.net\/blog\/2007\/04\/16\/groundhog-in-elizabeth-park\/"},"modified":"2026-07-01T11:35:21","modified_gmt":"2026-07-01T15:35:21","slug":"groundhog-in-elizabeth-park","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/nuxx.net\/blog\/2007\/04\/16\/groundhog-in-elizabeth-park\/","title":{"rendered":"Groundhog in Elizabeth Park"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"Groundhog!\"<\/a>Groundhog in Elizabeth Park (Trenton, MI)
(Click for more…)<\/center><\/p>\n

On the way home from Ohio yesterday I stopped off at Elizabeth Park in Trenton, MI<\/a> to meet up with Danielle. She had procured a My Little Pony<\/a> kite and was wanting to get out of the house and fly it. Well, after some kite flying<\/a> we were getting cold, so we started to walk over towards the water.<\/p>\n

As we got closer to the river we noticed a groundhog near the sidewalk<\/a>. As I walked closer to the groundhog I knelt \/ sat on the ground, and the groundhog kept getting closer<\/a>, and closer<\/a>, and closer<\/a>, seemingly wanting some food. Well, Danielle ran back to her car and grabbed a small packet of Cheetos Flamin’ Hot Crunchy<\/a> snacks that she had in the car.<\/p>\n

Sure, these aren’t the best thing to be feeding a groundhog, but it can’t be anything worse than what the groundhog would forage out of the garbage cans and from beneath picnic tables in the park. The groundhog happily ate the Cheetos<\/a>, taking them from our hands<\/a> and wrapping it’s little paw(s) around them<\/a>, eating them one at a time, sometimes standing up<\/a> right next to us.<\/p>\n

At one point the groundhog was so close that the only way I could get a photo of it. The photo above<\/a> was at 24mm, with the camera sitting on my knee and the groundhog about 1.5′ (or maybe less) from the end of the lens hood.<\/p>\n

Eventually we were getting a bit cold, so after letting the groundhog nose around in the bag a bit<\/a>, we decided to give it the rest of the Cheetos. Unfortunately, the seagulls in the park were being a bit of a bother, so the remains of the bag (but not the bag itself) were instead deposited deep into one of the openings to the groundhog’s burrow. Hopefully the seagulls weren’t able to get the bits there.<\/p>\n

More information on Marmota monax, (groundhog \/ woodchuck) is available from this U of M site<\/a> or this Wikipedia article<\/a>. All of the uploaded photos from time in Elizabeth Park yesterday can be found here (photo gallery retired)<\/em>.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Groundhog in Elizabeth Park (Trenton, MI)(Click for more…) On the way home from Ohio yesterday I stopped off at Elizabeth Park in Trenton, MI to meet up with Danielle. She had procured a My Little Pony kite and was wanting to get out of the house and fly it. Well, after some kite flying we\u2026<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[34,29],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-8725","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-moved-from-livejournal","category-outdoors"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/nuxx.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/8725","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/nuxx.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/nuxx.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/nuxx.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/nuxx.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=8725"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/nuxx.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/8725\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":24562,"href":"https:\/\/nuxx.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/8725\/revisions\/24562"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/nuxx.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=8725"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/nuxx.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=8725"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/nuxx.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=8725"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}