You know you’ve been living in Oregon too long when you actually like photographing wildlife in the rain.

Trained by years of hiking in my Portland, I brought along a pair of rain pants on our visit to the other Portland. They were put to good use on this rainy morning, even laying down in the wet grass I stayed nice and dry. The groundhogs were not so fortunate and were soaked through and through. Their wet fur has a bit of a porcupine appearance to it, but the apparent spines are actually the long guard hairs that the shorter underfur has clumped around, nicely showing off the white tips that give the fur a frosted look.

If you’d like to learn more about this lowland marmot, the University of Michigan has a nice writeup on Marmota monax, the groundhog.

I had been visiting Gilsland Farm for several days in a row letting this groundhog get used to me, so it was rather nonplussed when I slowly approached and lay flat on the rain-soaked ground. It worked an apple from start to finish, suddenly raising it high when it was nearly at the core, yielding one of my favorite pictures of the trip.

Groundhogs are primarily herbivores, often sitting back on their haunches and pulling plants to their mouths. Their love of plants makes them the enemy of gardeners, which I suppose is why the community gardens at Gilsland Farm Audubon Center were all fenced in.