A Groundhog's Habitat

Geography

• In the United States, the southern range of the groundhog is in Georgia and Alabama. The range extends northward throughout New England and the Great Lakes, with its western boundary in the Great Plains. Northern Idaho and eastern Alaska have a groundhog population, as does the majority of Canada from its western provinces east to northern sections of Quebec. The groundhog is unique to North America, existing in the wild nowhere else.

Suitable Habitat

• Look for groundhog throughout their range in places where clearings, meadows, large fields, rocky hillsides and open woodland exist. Such habitat usually has enough short plants and grasses to sustain healthy populations of groundhogs. The animals tend to stay out of swampy regions, since they live in extensive burrows they dig in the ground; wetland soil is too damp for this to be practical.

Summer and Winter Homes

• Groundhogs do not venture far from where they settle, but they do have different burrows for summer and winter within their habitat. In the summer months, a woodchuck lives in the middle of open fields when possible, to be close to its food supply. Farmlands are an optimum spot to live, with the groundhog sometimes living very close to human structures, according to the International Union for the Conservation of Nature. When the winter months close in, groundhogs hibernate underground, digging a separate chamber below the frost line in brushy or wooded places close to their summer residences, where they spend the winter until spring arrives.

Benefit From Man

• Groundhog populations in colonial times were much smaller, but the advancement of the European colonists across North America became a boon to the rodent, notes Hinterland's Who's Who. Instead of uninhabitable forests, lacking the open fields where a groundhog thrives, wide-open spaces sprang up as people began farming and cutting down the woodlands. Even in areas where farming no longer was profitable and people abandoned their farms, the habitat remained suitable for the groundhog. Factor in the crops people grew that provided food for the creature, and man played a huge role in the expansion of the groundhog range.