The morning after the groundhog showed up, a busy gray squirrel explored the hole at 8:31 AM, but didn't stick around. There is an overhanging walnut tree as well as multiple hickories along the other lane and he seemed to be out collecting. It is possible that he thought the hole was deserted and a good place to hide a nut.
Breakfast Nut |
At 9:22 AM, a fox squirrel passed by within a foot of the hole, pausing for pictures before hauling off a nut for breakfast. It seemed to ignore the hole, intent on its mission. This field has a large population of fox squirrels which had a very successful breeding season this year. It is seldom that we ride down the lane without having one dart out.
On October 3rd an armadillo showed up for a picture at 6:00 PM, crawling partway down into the burrow opening. At least one armadillo had babies this year along this stretch of the 1833 Ozark Mail Trace Road. By now, it is hard to know if this is the adult or one of the kids that have grown. It showed up again at the burrow around 10:00 PM as seen on the infrared camera picture below.
Early this summer we traced one of the young armadillos quadruplets to a burrow just a hundred feet away from this burrow. We watched as the youngsters would dart in and out of the hole, running down the road in front of our ATVs. The burrow was conveniently located in the thick hedgerow adjacent to the field overgrown with forbs and weeds.
The news at ten |
Summertime teenager |
Bobcat sniffing the hole |
Sniffing the camera |
More on animal burrows can be found at this National Geographic site.
An extensive resource on burrowing behaviors is in this umn.edu pdf from Current Mammology.