The Ground Hog Has Its Day

Image Gallery The ground hog (in this case, a hoary marmot) may not chuck much wood, but it can scanf down a tenth of its weight in greens each day. ©ALAN CAREY

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From chewing radiators to predicting the future, this critter has character.

The ground hog (in this case, a hoary marmot) may not chuck much wood, but it can scanf down a tenth of its weight in greens each day.

How much wood would a woodchuck chuck if a woodchuck could chuck wood?

Beats me. But that old conundrum does make one wonder about the origins of the name woodchuck. And what of the big rodent's other titles—such as ground hog and whistle-pig and, in the Western mountains, rockchuck and whistler?

No matter their local nicknames, both the woodchuck and its Western cousins technically are marmots, members of the genus Marmota (from the Latin for "mountain rat"). And all marmots—there are three major species in North America, including the woodchuck—belong to the same family as the squirrels. That family is Sciuridae (from the Greek, meaning "creatures that sit in the shadow of their tails").

But back to the origins of the name woodchuck. Although there are other explanations, the currently popular theory traces back to the Choctaw Indian word shukha, meaning hog. With the arrival of Europeans in North America, shukha soon enough was Anglicized to "chuck" and eventually merged with a word describing the place the little Indian hog was found—"woods." Woodchuck, then, can be taken to mean woods hog and, thus, has not a splinter of connection to chucking wood.

Then there's that other name, ground hog —and the day connected with the moniker.

Folk legend has it, you'll recall, that each February 2, this Rip Van Winkle of the mammal world rouses from his winter hibernation, emerges from his burrow and checks the weather, especially the presence or absence of sunshine. If the sun is shining and he sees his own plump shadow, that's bad, and means winter will last another six weeks; if no shadow shows, that's good, indicating spring is near at hand.

To understand the concept of ground-hog-as-meteorologist and how such an odd notion became elevated to the status of an annually observed folk tradition, it helps to know something of the nature of the beast.

The woodchuck gets its name from the Indians, the yellow-bellied marmot from a burnt orange gut and the hoary marmot from its silver-gray hair. All three have incisors sized for serious eating.

The ground hog's species name is Marmota monax, the latter being a Lenape Indian word meaning "digger." Unlike so many other wild creatures of eastern North America, the ground hog did not suffer from the clearing of the forests as the pioneers and subsequent settlers made room for human enterprise, but indeed benefitted from the creation of manmade pastures and fields.

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