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Thursday, September 29, 2011

Gem Of The Day: "Gracie's Story. Part Deux."

Dear Small Pawsers,

This is a "just for you" newsletter from me. (not required reading but may be fun for you!)

Back on August 17, I shared with you all the story of my love affair with, yes, with a Groundhog, complete with picture and videos.

Gracie's Story

So many of you responded to this story that I was taken back, really!

So, this is the second installment of the story of my life with Gracie.

There will be pictures and videos and you will not believe a couple of them! HA!

Here are the answers to some of your most pressing Groundhog questions.

Yes,Gracie's still here and visiting me daily, SO UP CLOSE AND PERSONAL THAT YOU WON'T BELIEVE IT ESPECIALLY WHAT HAPPENED LAST EVENING OH MY LORD!

On September 12, she came up and licked my toes. The next day she was gone.

Her baby was still here but no Gracie. I felt like she had been telling me goodbye by licking my toes. (Dale said she was tasting me. Yipes. She has big teeth.)

I thought Gracie had maybe gone into hibernation, early, but the baby was still here, eating heartily each evening.

I wasn't really worried about her since I wasn't aware of any further attacks on her person, uh, er, Groundhog. (SALLY ANNE PRESSNALL THIS MEANS YOU.)

Gracie was gone for 13 days and I have no idea where, but she did look a little larger when she returned last Monday evening! I was delighted to see her!

So no, Gracie hasn't gone into hibernation yet.

She's supposed to go into hibernation after the first hard freeze, which in Oklahoma is around November 7 on average. (There are conflicting stories online about the date of GROUNDHOG hibernation. One said it happens mid September. That one is WRONG evidently. I have TWO LIVE AND UP CLOSE groundhogs here that beg to differ.)

Yes, Gracie's baby is still here as well, and she's coming closer and closer to get the fruits and veggies that we hope will help to sustain her over the winter.

50% of all Groundhogs don't survive hibernation. (I take this to mean that 50% of someone ELSE'S groundhogs aren't going to make it.)

They eat grasses and acorns in the wild. Normal groundhogs do at least.

Gracie and her baby eat apples, carrots, peaches, pineapples, melons, plums, and oranges.

They are little spoiled rotten gourmet Groundhogs.

Gracie once tasted a turnip.

Then she spit it out, shook her head and stuck her tongue out at me.

I told her that I didn't do that.

Blame the turnip on "Scary Daddy". He adds things to the Groundhog bowl all day long. Leftover cantaloupe peelings, watermelon rinds, etc.

No, I don't know how old Gracie is. She won't say.

Her baby was born this past spring and the baby is called "a yearling".

Ok, now that we have the question and answer portion of the program out of the way, let me tell you about my Groundhog, who, as the old gospel song says, "becomes sweeter and sweeter" with each passing day.

The day we came back from vacation, Gracie was waiting on me out in the side yard, next to the woods.

I rushed inside to get her dinner ready. Our house sitter had fed her each day while I was away.

Gracie is still underweight after Sally Anne Groundhog Zombie, got her earlier in the summer.

Gracie had retreated into her hole for a full 21 days, emerging only after day 22, having lost over a third of her body mass.

Gracie appears in the evenings around 5:45 P.M. She has a built in dinner bell.

I was having trouble keeping the baby from taking Gracie's food and on more than one occasion, they got into a food fight.

"It's MINE!"

"No, it's MINE! GIVE IT TO MEEEE!"

They would move their little "hands" up the stick of a carrot, one on top of the other like it was a baseball bat and they were little leaguers, tugging in between moves.

At first I was concerned because the baby is so much larger than Gracie, but then I read on groundhoghaven.com that this is normal Groundhog behavior. (At least something about them is normal.)

I also noticed that after the food fights, they would lay down together and groom each other, so it bothered me a whole lot more than it bothered them.

That being said, wanna see one of the food fights? It's ok! They are both ok!

Click here to see the short video.

And in another video, Gracie fell over backwards and never missed a lick of eating her plum. Notice she ALMOST crawls up into my lap. This was on August 29.

Click her to see this video. Gracie falls over backwards and keeps on ticking.

Now you may see something in that last video which may cause to think that Gracie is indeed a GRADY and not a female.

I saw it too and sent the video to one of Kathryn Smith's (Our Team Leader to the Carolinas) friend's who is a zoologist.

She tells me that Gracie is a girl and that was good enough for me.

So now you may be asking, "But what about the baby?"

Well the baby is the size of a small elephant seal and she is doing quite well, thank you very much. (I may be exaggerating a tiny bit about her size, but not much,)

Click here to see a video taken of the baby, on Monday night, Notice at the end, Gracie ALMOST crawls up in my lap again. (Sorry the camera is so shaky, It's not easy pitching apples and being the camera man at the same time!)

Then this past Monday night, Gracie absolutely TRIED TO CRAWL UP IN MY LAP, and lost her footing in a pile of leaves and went rolling downhill.

Here is that video entitled "Gracie Trips". (Sorry for the odd ending, but I was trying to see about her after she tripped. She was fine!)

Gracie has the softest brown eyes. She is still quite small, especially in comparison to her baby, who thinks that her name is "Gracie" also. When I call "Graaaaaa-cieee", the baby answers to this as well and I figure it's too late in the game to confuse her by calling her by her given name, which is really "Gretchen".

Then last night, something so unbelievable happened that I could barely breathe.

I was out sitting in my lawn chair on the side of our driveway, facing the woods, feeding the baby who ALWAYS comes out before Gracie does.

I'm just talking away to her as my neighbors are surely contemplating calling mental health professionals on my behalf.

I heard Mary, my neighbor of 20 years across the street, pull up from work.

She parks in the street, so it naturally caused me to look over there.

I remember thinking that the sound of her car door would be enough to drive Skitsy Baby back into the hole as she is frightened of everything, which is fine with me. I want her to be frightened of people and of noises.

Well, while I was glancing over to Mary's car door closing, it happened.

OH MY LORD.

Out of nowhere she came.

Gracie was running FAST from the bushes near the street, RIGHT UP THE DRIVEWAY, headed RIGHT TOWARDS ME AS MARY WATCHED WITH HER MOUTH OPEN.

I didn't have five seconds to prepare for what was about to happen next.

Boom. There Gracie was and BOOM!

SHE JUMPED RIGHT UP INTO MY LAP LIKE SHE WAS A DOG AND NO I AM NOT KIDDING!

I couldn't breathe. I couldn't move.

I didn't coax her or invite her. She just JUMPED!

I sat there stunned as Mary must have thought this was a nightly occurrence.

Mary asked me if this was a baby groundhog. She was clearly enamored.

Her husband has seen the Groundhogs and has come over to talk to me while I'm feeding them. The baby charged him on Monday night, HA, from 20 feet away.

I told him that she doesn't like men.

He said his wife thinks he's nuts as everytime he tells her to come and look NOW, there is nothing to see by the time she gets there.

Well, she saw something last night, alright!

I couldn't even speak I was so stunned! There Gracie was, in my lap!

I didn't know if me speaking would cause her to become afraid and if she might turn and bite the fire out of me. I mean she IS a wild animal. (Sort of. The zoologists thinks that she was raised by humans and released near here.)

While she sat on my lap, I didn't pet Gracie or touch her, thinking that that might scare her. Her tail was to my face and she was facing towards the woods.

Her nails are each an inch long, for digging.

They softly tapped over my skin.

She sat there on my bare legs, (I had shorts on as it was 90 here yesterday) just sniffing me and making baby puppy noises. I have never heard these sweet little sounds coming from her before.

I took a chance and answered Mary, quietly.

"This is Gracie, the Mama. The baby is much larger and she is down here." I halfway pointed to the lawn near the woods. Don't move too fast or you may have a Groundhog attached to your leg.

Mary said she had never seen anything like this and she is a biology professor!

She thinks SHE has never seen anything like this. I was still stunned and wondering what would happen next!

This was better than a James Patterson suspense novel!

I knew I needed to breathe but I was afraid to do so!

THERE she was, just standing on my LAP!

Well, she wasn't going to get anything to eat on my lap unless it was ME, so I slowly reached down for the bowl and got a carrot.

She saw that.

I placed it beside my foot on the driveway and she jumped right down and began to eat it.

Thank God. I wasn't the victim of Groundhog hazing. She seemed to KNOW me, to KNOW that I would protect her, so know that it was safe to jump in my lap.

No, I didn't have the camera out there but I doubt she would have jumped up on me if I had been holding it.

She ate two halves of a carrot and a peach and then wandered back down to her hole as it was almost dark.

I got up and came inside, not even slowing down to speak to Dale, who was getting dinner in the kitchen. I called to him over my shoulder that I was headed straight for the shower.

I told him that Grace had jumped in my lap and I wanted to make sure the dogs didn't catch Groundhog fever or some weird something, so I was going to go and scrub.

The while time in the shower all I could do was say, "OH MY GOD", over and over.

Brant Cramer asked me how I will know if it is her in the spring, if she makes it through hibernation.

He thought they all must look alike.

I know Gracie. I have studied her all summer. I know her little expressions, he movements, and the way she comes to me when I call her name.

The lyrics to a song came to me last night while she was standing there on my legs, as I know that our days together are winding down as she prepares to hibernate for the winter.

"Oh, it's a long, long while from May to December
But the days grow short when you reach September
When the autumn weather turns the leaves to flame
One hasn't got time for the waiting game

Oh, the days dwindle down to a precious few
September, November
And these few precious days I'll spend with you
These precious days I'll spend with you"

Humphrey Sisco
Dec 26, 1993~ Aug 30, 2006

When I first saw this beautiful picture of Cheri Sisco's "Humphrey", I thought it was truly the epitome of what we do, and why we do it. I wanted to use this black and white picture of Humphrey, taken only days before his death due to congestive heart failure, to let those who may be new to Small Paws, know what we do and why we do it. Without Small Paws, Humphrey would have never known love. He would have died in a kill shelter, sick and alone. Because of Small Paws, and Cheri Sisco, he lived, he loved, and he smiled.

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