How Much Wood Could a Woodchuck Chuck

Enlarge Image Image Gallery 'Ah, siesta time.' Shutterstock.com/David P. Lewis

If you live in the eastern half of the continental United States (other than the Deep South), or anywhere in southern Canada, you’ve probably met ol’ Chuck. If you also live within whistling distance of a patch of dry ground, you probably have ol’ Chuck for a neighbor.

I’m speaking, of course, about the woodchuck, groundhog or whistle pig. Scientists call him (and her) Marmota monax. Farmers and gardeners call him (and her) . . . well, never mind about that.

On the list of most-beloved North American mammals, the portly waddling woodchuck occupies a burrow of its own, perhaps nosing out such rodent-kin pests as house mice and rats. Our reasons for disliking the creature are few but intensely felt: It eats food crops before we can eat them, and it punches dangerous holes in the ground.

Indeed, a hungry woodchuck – which is any woodchuck that isn’t dead or hibernating – can wipe out whole rows of seedlings in a fraction of the time it takes to plant them. And its burrow openings, often hidden by grass or sloping terrain, can snap a tractor axle – or the leg of a lamb, cow or horse.

So it’s the rare rural resident who rejoices at the sight of a new Chuck in the neighborhood. Traditionally, the animal’s welcome comes in the form of a .22-gun salute.

Not exactly a knock on the door from the Welcome Wagon.

Our animosity, at least, is understandable. Even as peaceable a gardener as Henry David Thoreau had a hard time sacrificing his beans to ol’ Chuck. “My enemies,” he lamented in Walden, “are worms, cool days, and, most of all, woodchucks. The last have nibbled for me a quarter of an acre clean.”

You don’t have to love an enemy, though, to admire him. And it turns out there’s a good bit in the woodchuck to admire – if only grudgingly – when you take the time to look.

Family ties

Woodchucks are members of the marmot clan, the genus name Marmota being a proper Latin scientific name with a less-than-proper English translation: mountain rat. Many of Chuck’s Marmota cousins around the world do, in fact, live in mountainous or rocky terrain. Among them are the two other North American species: the yellow-bellied marmot, which lives in much of the West, and the hoary marmot, which ranges from our Northwest through Canada’s Yukon Territory to most of Alaska.

Though both species also inhabit lowlands, they prefer to make their dens at higher elevations, in or near rock piles. The marmots like the sort of place that most gardeners avoid.