Groundhog's Day

It may be Leap Day, but today's post is for February's other claim to fame, in honor of Punxsutawney Phil. Last week, I was out in the backyard and saw this:

To be fair, we don't actually know what made the hole, or if anyone is living in there at the moment. We figured it was so broad and deep that it might even have another exit, though we haven't seen signs of any other such holes around the yard. For scale, here's a branch that we found laying nearby:

And here's the same branch, twisted around a corner until its entire length was underground. The hole clearly kept going after that, but switched back in a way that made it hard to find anything that would go through and give us an estimate of how long it went.

Hoping that we weren't going to trap anyone inside, we used a large portion of a bag of compost sitting in the shed to fill it in, trying to press it as much as possible. One week later, the hole hasn't come back.

I wonder who was setting up a home in our yard. I hope they're ok, but I also hope they go elsewhere. Heck, right next door is a giant empty lot just begging for a network of groundhogs/moles/bunnies.