I had a visitor a few days ago from out of state. We were sitting on the patio having a drink when the visitor exclaimed, “oh look, there’s a woodchuck.” Well, actually the animal was a groundhog. We have lots of them in our area. But a lot of people do refer to groundhogs as woodchucks. Since we moved to West Virginia, I’ve heard groundhogs referred to as whistle pigs.
The word woodchuck is probably derived from the word wuchak —the local Native American word for groundhog. Probably the early settlers couldn’t be bothered to learn a language other than English (kind of like Americans today) so they just transformed the Algonquian Indian word into an English word that sounded similar.
But anyhow, I thought of the old tongue twister, “How much wood would a woodchuck chuck, if a woodchuck could chuck wood?” Actually, I don’t know if woodchucks even can chuck wood — I’ve never seen one do it. But what if woodchucks could chuck wood? I don’t think this topic has received the amount of research it probably should have, and I haven’t seen any studies that have proved that woodchucks are even capable of chucking wood. I do know that they seem to enjoy gnawing through wood though.
If the woodchucks in our neighborhood are any indication, one thing they are good at is chucking dirt. They have lots of tunnels near our house that are very long and at least several feet deep.
Now — I’m not making this up — I did find one “woodchuck expert” that determined that if the displaced dirt in a typical woodchuck burrow was replaced with wood, the average woodchuck might be able to chuck about 700 pounds of it. So there you have it — maybe.
If I remember the rhyme, it goes, “How much wood would a woodchuck chuck, if a woodchuck could chuck wood? A woodchuck would chuck all the wood he could, if a woodchuck could chuck wood.”
That might be none…..
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