Byline: Susan E. Tomer Staff writer
About this time of year you may go out into your garden one evening and find a chubby woodchuck nibbling at your beans. Woodchucks - aka ground-hogs - love beans. They also are fond of peas, corn, carrot tops, fallen apples, clover, alfalfa, grass, even young tree bark. They are such dedicated vegetarians they mow down anything in their path.
And if you are bothered by these creatures that stand endearingly on their hind legs like prairie dogs, pity the poor farmer. His crops fall victim to the woodchuck's enormous appetite and his fields are potholed by burrow entrances that cripple farm machinery.
"They raise havoc, mainly with hayfields. On a farm level, they certainly qualify as a nuisance," says Thomas Gallagher, livestock and field crop agent with the Cooperative Extension of Albany County.
Woodchucks are rodents with typically big rodent teeth. They are in the same family that …
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