Few mammals put a calendar on the wall as clearly as Maryland’s groundhog. Reports pour in from April through July, swell through spring, then collapse to nearly nothing from November into February, when the animals are sealed underground in true hibernation. That curve is the species’ life story rendered as data: fatten up all summer, vanish all winter, and re-emerge around the holiday that made it famous.
With just over 2,000 records since 2000, this is one of the best-documented mammals in the state, and the record map carries the usual caveat. Baltimore, Montgomery, and Prince George’s counties lead the counts partly because that’s where the observers are. The species’ real footprint is broader than the metro corridor: records run from Garrett County’s mountain ridges in the far west to the farm country of the Eastern Shore, in 23 counties all told.
The places with the heaviest tallies tell their own story. The Chesapeake and Ohio Canal National Historical Park tops the list, and a grassy towpath between a canal prism and a wooded bluff is close to perfect groundhog real estate: open forage next to safe, diggable slopes. Antietam National Battlefield, Elk Neck State Park, and other mown-edge parks follow the same logic. NatureServe ranks the groundhog secure in Maryland, and nothing in the record suggests otherwise.
