The Groundhog

I was on the porch, minding my own business cutting apart seed pots with Zinnia sprouts in them, when the cat started growling. I looked out the cat door-- and there by the shed was a ground hog as big, or maybe bigger, than the cat. As J said, "Mr. Skunk is subletting." I walked outside and the 'hog immediately hauled itself into the crawlspace under the shed, so I sat down and waited. Nothing. So I planted the zinnia, and got out the weed wacker, and started to wack (with the camera in my pocket), and looked up to see this hilariously worried face looking at me. The photos are a little blurry because my zoom is tiny and I was braced against the weed wacker and not a tripod, but there the 'hog is.

It's a fully grown adult--I have no idea where it's been, but maybe my neighbor disturbed it with his riding mower yesterday. J has been remarkably apathetic about the skunk under the shed, but he is a lot less happy with the groundhog, so I think the plan is to roll a bunch of mothballs under there and hope the stink discourages everyone from sleeping in there. Also there is some heavy iron mesh the previous owners had there and we foolishly moved, so we may put the mesh back in and roll rocks in front of it to discourage digging.
....

I have to add that I told my neighbor Ed that we had a groundhog under the shed, and he said that he had a humane trap that we could borrow and use to move the groundhog, if we wanted to. "Just put an apple in there, they like those"... but then he went on to say that we needed to line the bottom of the cage with paper, since groundhogs make a terrible mess when they are scared. And they smell bad, and that we want to take it "down some gravel road far away" because he had already gotten 2 tickets from the cops for moving wildlife, and he had gone down to one little park nearby and had just taken out the trap when he saw the cop car coming, so he tipped up the trap to dump out the groundhog and get away... and the groundhog didn't want to come out, and then after Ed gave the trap a shake, it fell out and grabbed his leg instead of running away, probably because it was trying to hide. So here is Ed doing the panic dance, and he wasn't able able to really deny what he was up to to the cop.

 I am thinking the mothballs sound like a better option.