What ever happened to Ontario groundhogs?

phishstik said:
I remember 15 years ago having trouble with them in hay fields around here. We bought some kind of smoke/poison stick that you put in their holes and got rid of them. Maybe it got too easy to get rid of them? Doubt you could still buy that stuff anymore!
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Funny you should mention those things. They were called Giant Destroyers..... I happened to see a few packs of them at the local TSC store a few weeks ago, first time in many years.

Years ago my dad almost burned our house down with one. He put it in the attic to try and get rid of some chipmunks, and put it on a clay pot. They burn so hot that it shattered the pot, and then started burning through the fibreglass insulation !!!! He finally managed to get it bundled up in a few batts of insulation and it burned itself out within that bundle. It contains it's own oxidizer so you can't put it out.
 
I have been told that Possums will go right down their holes in the winter (when the hogs are hibernating) and kill them.

Something else to keep in mind is ground hogs also like mature pasture and fence rows. From what I see there are fewer cattle around now and there are more cash crops being planted. People also tend to replant their hay fields after a few years, unlike in the past when they just planted them and left them for extended periods of time.

I'm not saying Coyotes don't do their fair share to the Ground hogs, but I don't think they are the only ones to blame for the decline.
 
N o one shoots birds of pray any more.Farmers use to put traps on the poles around the farm to kill them,now you go to jail.young hogs are easy pray for hawks and eagles.I watch a golden eagle eat a ground hog.I see so many birds of pray now a days that I go home and look them up to see what kind they are.When you shoot a hog,theres a race between the vulchers and the hawks to find it.
 
Great topic but then again...any topic about groundhogs is. :) This is my second year hunting them so I can't say, with any authority, what's causing the decline. Other than taking pot-shots at them with my air gun as a kid SW of Collingwood (32 years ago) my frame of reference is a recent one. What I HAVE learned is that is that I find more of them in "Alliston/NW of there" than anywhere else. Granted, it's where I've spent most of my time looking. I have observed the following on my hunts;

1. Hunting pressure affects their behavior which is to say, G-hogs that DON'T get hunted are easier to spot/spook less. Makes sense of course, but I think there is a tendency to imagine the wild/hunted ones are as tame as the ones you see grazing on the side of the road sometimes. They'll stay low when they sense danger, and may only reveal the tops of their heads.

2. Timing~we find most on either young bean fields (spring only) or in hay fields in the spring, and after each cut. That means that during the rest of the time (most of the season) they're in/among plants that are as high or higher than they are. Can you still spot them? Sure, but it's a bit like fishing~part of the challenge is the faith that you're in a decent spot and moving about quietly, glassing fields from a distance, etc. Believe me, I want it to be easier than that, I'm a fat dude...and those long hikes are the only exercise I (reluctantly) get. Worth it~we usually spot/nail a few every outing.

Anyhow, I'm rambling because I think there is an assumption out there that these things are always easy, always dumb, ought to be plentiful, etc. My experience, albeit, limited...suggests that most groundhogs ARE wary and don't want to be within view of people. Maybe the remaining ones are extra-wary, and the plentiful/dumb ones have been picked-off by predators? I know one thing~3-4 people who have posted about seeing lots of them are about to be PM'd. :)

Here are a few that I shot this summer, in the order I shot them. Faster/leaner in the spring, plump/slower as the season progresses. Still not as fast as a bullet, and the new .223 gets tested this weekend. Hopefully, they haven't started their winter nap yet!

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Coyotes love groundhogs and really know how to hunt them! Lots of coyotes, very few groundhogs. We're they fun to shoot. I guided big game hunters for years and the real good shots in those days hunted groundhogs
 
Pictures of ground hogs in pasture/hay land are far more common that ground hogs in corn fields. The demographics of producing livestock feed has changed so that corn produces far more Total Digestable Nutrients per acre than grasses.
In the late 60's the preponderance of fields were grass. I was shooting a Remington 40XB in 6mm Remington, and making shots out to 400 yards which was the maximum due to the lay of the land.
Talked to some farmers one day who appeared to hold some sort of "Choir Practice", and found the owner of the property. He consented to me shooting hogs but no one was able to see the hog spotted up in one corner. When the rifle came out, there was one comment, "So you are the guy with the white barreled shotgun." Following the shot, declared as a hit, no one knew where the shot was to. A walk to the hogs measured 275 yards, held him up and dropped him into his hole. None of them had seen a hog shot at that distance, and were probably looking within 50 to 100 yards. Upon returning to that same area in the early 80's showed the conversion to corn. The only hogs seen were at Connaught . . . more like cow pasutre.
 
Groundhog populations in south central Ontario have plunged dramatically in recent years. In speaking with MNR friends and biologists, nobody seems able to pinpoint the reason. Sure, there are pockets and regions that still have shootable populations, but as a whole, the population has declined significantly. This was brought home to me last year on a trip to Ottawa with students; while driving through the Ottawa Valley, I saw for the first time in years in Ontario, numerous groundhogs in farm fields. I used to see groundhogs in such numbers years ago as a teenager in Simcoe County, and would spend many a summer day on a local farm thinning them out (hence "Chuckbuster").

Hopefully, the population recovers from whatever it is that has caused the decline...I haven't returned a groundhog to the carbon cycle for many years now, and would like to once again stalk a farm field for them.
 
In central Ontario (my area) they are few and far between.

I'm pretty sure that the coyotes (thick around here) are the main culprit.

I saw one in the last year and a half .... in my back garden!

Nowhere else on the property.
 
I think that most guys who see "plenty" have no idea how many there were back a few decades ago. I have noticed some comments from friends when I drove through the Kitchener area and also closer to London last year. Both of them commented how many 'hogs we were seeing...but I would have expected many times that number if we had done the same drive in, say, 1975.
 
We had plenty of them on our 275 acres when I was a kid (30 years ago) but one good weekend with the water tank cleaned out probably 40 of them and now there is maybe 3 or 4 a year that move into the fields from the bush. Coyotes and crop rotation also affect the numbers.
 
When the river was up last spring, the little fur boogers climbed over the tracks and found their
way into peoples back yards.
Not mine or there might of been some bylaws........................*&%$#

 
ive never seen one out on any of thefars i go to but i have seen one in my neighborhood and i live in downtown windsor

from what ive seen rabbits are worse for holes in the ground
 
I have many fond memories of hunting ground hogs around Paris Ontario in the 1960'2 as well as rabbit and squirrel. Hunting in SW Ontario was always pleasant - no wind compared to my home on the prairies and the fence lines were thick with hardwoods and provided great cover for squirrels and rabbits. It was a great escape from university classes and the rural people back then were as friendly as those in western Canada but yet strangely conservative in their own way. The ground hogs were large in those days and a good well placed smack from a CIL Wizz Bang hollow point was often needed to anchor the bigger ones for good. The ground hogs occupied the field edges and the narrow band of land between the fence line and the corn crop. They preferred hay fields and grazing lands such as there was and occasional long shots were needed. The .222 Remington was considered the best for this job and ostensibly made less noise than a .303 fired on an 80 acre farm. I came from the prairies and even in the 1960's western farms were well beyond 80 acres in size and far enough apart that nobody flinched at the sound of a rifle shot. Who knows it could have been a maundering porcupine. Perhaps times have changed and even biology has marched on in an ever changing environment where chemicals, fertilizers, and crop costs have replaced maintaining tilth with manure and grazing and the report of a rifle is a cause for angst.
 
In the Lindsay area of southern Ontario I would bet you could count the number of groundhogs seen in a year on one hand now, I use to hunt them in the 80's and 90's and there was lots of them. A typical afternoon hunting them you would easily count 5 to 10 in farmers fields while wandering around and the farmers were always glad to get rid of them. I see the odd one around now and don't even bother shooting them they are so scarce, same with red foxes. I would guess the coyotes moving in have reduced the numbers of both foxes and groundhogs in this area.
 
I hunted coyotes extensively in the 70's and 80's in central Ontario. It was nothing to go to the Hockley Hills and shoot 50 in a day. There were so many that farmers wanted t pay us to shoot them. We used to see hundreds in fields everywhere. We ran out of ammo so many times that I made a portable loading bench to reload in my truck. It was the same everywhere, but we never saw a coyote. The same is true around Barrie, Ontario with deer. We used to see 30 deer a day while hunting and very few coyotes. Now we see 30 deer a week and shoot more coyotes than deer. Get rid of the coyotes and ground hog and deer numbers will increase
 
Blaming Coyotes and Lynx and ....whatever, for the dwindling number of Groundhogs in Ontario is naive. It is like blaming Seals for disappearance of Cod and not seeing the gigantic foreign factory ships that basically vacuumed all of the breading grounds of Cod fish for two decades. They decimated the population. It is like blaming the gradual disappearance of fish in southern Ontario, on "Chinese anglers, because there are too many of them and they keep the fish they catch"! A fellow angler actually said that, while fishing for Trout on Niagara River next to me! How about 150 years worth of chemicals being dumped in the 5 lakes by surrounding factories?

For real answers, look at the environmental changes, both man made or natural. An increased number of Coyotes can help but can not cause such an obvious decline in the groundhog population.
 
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