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So, I found this fella while I was walking on the golf course by my house. Initially, I wasn’t sure it was an animal at all.

I’m sorry the picture isn’t better, but I didn’t want get close without knowing more. It appears to me that he has his head burrowed into the ground and his butt in the air (which strikes me as an incredibly dangerous way for an animal to sleep or rest).

I sat there and watched him for 5 or 10 minutes, and when I moved closer to him, it’s possible that there was a slight movement of the muscles in his back or butt, like maybe he was attempting to pull his head out. It was subtle though.

Other than that, the only movement was breathing. My initial thought is that he’d be awfully big to be a raccoon, but I’m no expert and it’s hard to tell how big he actually is the way he’s positioned. I live in SE Michigan.

Is he just bad at hibernating? Stuck? Hiding from me?

unknown animal

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    $\begingroup$ My initial reaction was groundhog, but that's because I grew up in PA and those things are a plague. It's definitely not a raccoon, because the coloring is wrong. Maybe a beaver, but you'd probably notice the tail. Too big for a muskrat. Without knowing more about the local ME fauna, groundhog is probably a safe guess. They do sleep out in the open and can become very habituated to humans, so the behavior matches up. Too bad you didn't get a different angle... $\endgroup$ – MattDMo Mar 7 '20 at 12:30

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