Hibernating Groundhog Undermines Johnson City Home Sale – A Critter Catchers Story 

Mr. Howell had a problem.  Let's just call the problem Phil.  Phil was a groundhog.  He lived in New York and worked in the investment industry, (Not the groundhog, Mr. Howell) but he had a home in Johnson City Tennessee left to him by his recently deceased mother that needed to be sold. Nobody was certain where Phil was for certain, but neighbors had sighted the critter in the back yard several months back darting for the deck behind the house.  The Mr. Howell feared that the animal might cause damage to the foundations of the house and wasn’t sure how to get Phil out.  It was suspected that there was a den deep underneath the home and the home could not be sold and estate settled until it was out, so I was called in.  

This groundhog call was a little unusual in that it came in the winter.  Most calls come when a groundhog is spotted darting beneath a building.  Wherever Phil was right at that time, it was likely that he was doing a lot more snoring than darting.  Unfortunately, the biggest problem that Mr. Howell had was not that there might be a groundhog under the home. That is an easy problem to solve.  His biggest problem was that it was winter time and that ground hog wasn’t due to come out till the grass was green in the spring.  You see, most people don’t know this, but groundhogs are deep hibernators and sleep the entire winter through. (Groundhogs can be difficult that way.)   

To get Mr. Howell permanent relief from the groundhog, we obviously needed to do some screening to keep the groundhog out, but the critter needed to be extracted first.  I crawled under the deck to take a look.  Sure enough, there was a large gap under the concrete slab that supported the dining room.  I could see about ten feet or so back which is not a good situation.  Concrete is not happy when it is suspended in air.  It tends to break.  

Critter Guy Under the Concrete Slab 

I had pretty good sight distance considering it was a groundhog burrow, but I couldn’t see all the way to the back.  I am not a big guy, but I sure wasn’t going to fit into that burrow to check it.  I considered tunneling in a little bit to get a better look, but I thought that the concrete slab would probably not benefit from having enough dirt removed from underneath it to get 200 pounds of critter guy in there to search for the groundhog.   Who wants to go nose to nose with a cranky, half drowsy ground hog when you are in a tight space and can hardly move your arms well, anyway?  (I made a mental note to check with the dog trainer lady that I had met on a job one the other side of Johnson City about a trained Weiner Dog.   That would have done the trick.  Good critter guys always think outside the box.) 

Slurp Slithering Under the Deck 

While rolling around in the cold, sticky, mud underneath the deck I had a brainstorm.   There might or might not be a groundhog under the home.  If we got lucky and there wasn’t a groundhog under there we could go ahead and screen in.  So, I “slurp slithered” my way back out from under the deck and headed back to the truck for my infra-red camera.  This thing was crazy sensitive and I thought that I might be able to pick up some body heat from the critter underneath and have an answer. 

So, I “slurp slithered” my way back under the deck with the camera in my pocket and considered increasing my rates in cases where I was required to “slurp slither”.  Once I got back to the burrow area, I had a little more head space and I could “crouch crawl”.  I was really glad to get up out of my slurp slither stance.  It was wearing badly on my pants and front of my shirt.  Any good wildlife guy worth his salt is very familiar with the slurp slither, crouch crawl, attic truss yoga, and other maneuvers that are required to get to the critter affected areas of a home.   

“Tight Squeezing” and Weight Loss 

Once, I “tight squeezed” myself through a teenager sized manhole deep in the crawlspace under a home.  Halfway through I discovered that my belt made me just a little bit too big to fit through, so I backed up and took my belt off and made another try.  I was concerned that I might lose my pants on the way through but there wasn’t anybody else down there, so I wasn’t too worried.  Several buttons popped off my shirt in the process, but on the upside, I squeezed off five pounds in the process.  My wife noticed right away when I got home and said that it made me look sexier.   Thanks sweetie.  Unseen benefits, yahoo! (Part of this is true!  You can decide which part.  A good wildlife guy always has a good sense of humor.  It helps us get through hard days.) 

Unfortunately, all the slurp slithering and crouch crawling were for nothing.  The camera itself worked well, but all it picked up was some residual heat bleeding through the concrete slab from inside the house.   There was too much background heat to be able to get a definitive answer.   Crud, there is nothing worse than wasting a difficult slurp slither trip out from under the deck for nothing.   

Which Type of Gear to Use? 

I gave Mr. Howell a progress report on the way home to Bristol and considered my options.  Normally, I like to set a one-way door or flush mounted force through trap over the burrow entrance.  Both of these set ups do essentially the same thing.  They are devices mounted over the entrance so that the animal has to pass through to exit the burrow.   One-way doors don’t have to be checked daily because the animal is free to wander off into the sunset unhindered.   

 If I set a trap, we would have to check it daily so that an animal won’t waste away and die inside.  Daily trap checks could run into some serious money for the client.   If I charged the customer for daily house calls for two months that is going to get crazy expensive.  Fortunately, Mr. Howell had a very dependable neighbor who could check the trap and call in with a report.  That would save me some trips.  Great neighbors like that are harder and harder to come by these days.   We went with the trap setup. 

Well, closure wasn’t to come soon.   Groundhogs don’t come out of hibernation till there is green grass worth eating.   Mr. Howell had his neighbor across the street check the trap daily and call in to let me know if there was something in it or not.  Having a trap set for a long time increases the odds that some nontarget animal will wind up in the traps.  In this case we did end up catching a neighborhood cat.  I’m not sure why it wanted to visit my trap.  If we hadn't been checking the traps regularly curiosity really could have killed the cat. 

While all this trap checking and cat catching was going on, I drove from customer to customer watching for that first sighting of a groundhog on the side of the road to signal the arrival of spring groundhog season.  Finally, it came.  A solitary groundhog standing in the grass beside I-26 in Johnson City...time to finish up.   

Closure! 

Once we felt comfortable that the groundhog was out, I slither crawled back the trap (a slurp slither was not necessary since things were a little dryer than before) and removed the trap.  I hated to leave a void under the concrete slab, so I took a long board and packed soil back underneath the slab as best I could.  I used a hammer to pound the board so that the soil would be packed as best possible.  It wasn’t as solid as I would have liked, but it was a lot better than an empty space.   I went through several wheelbarrow loads of soil in the process.  There had been some settling of soil under the concrete.  The settling was probably part of what got the groundhog interested in the first place.  If there is just a tiny little gap underneath, they can peep into, it piques their interest and they are likely to start digging. 

Once the soil was packed, I installed screen along the entire edge of the concrete slab.  I anchored it along the top edge with screws.  The bottom edge was buried into the soil in a trench about 12” wide.  If another groundhog tries to dig underneath, it will hit the screen and stop.  The groundhog is not smart enough to back up and find the edge of the screen and start again.  Security!  

Groundhog Snoozing Somewhere Else 

In the end, I determined that there was no groundhog hibernating under the home.  I hated that the process took so long, but I just didn’t want to take the chance on trapping an animal inside and neither did Mr. Howell.  Things turned out O.K. however.  Mr. Howell had other work that had to be done while we waited for the ground hog issue to be resolved.  Fortunately, I worked faster than the carpenter, and I didn’t hold him up. 

I respected that Mr. Howell didn’t want to dump his problem on the next owner.  How terrible could it have been for the new owner of the house?  Imagine, just getting settled in and unpacking the last box when a green shiny fly buzzes by and the unmistakable odor of a rotting carcass wafts to your nose.  Whew nasty!  Or worse yet, the groundhog stays and maybe one day it digs out one paw full of dirt too many, the concrete snaps, and the dining room table is sitting at enough of an angle that the silverware slides off into the floor.  Yikes!  I don’t even want to think about it.