If You Ask Me / By Martha Knight

Bill Potter Photo

There’s not much to be said for woodchucks. And yet, here I am, writing my 30th (or so) woodchuck column.

If I did not devote at least some of this space to Marmota monax, as the worthless critter is known in scientific circles, I’d catch it. I don’t mean I’d actually catch a woodchuck, but that some of my readers would upbraid me.

One year I did not realize the upcoming issue of our favorite weekly was the last before February 2, until it was on the newsstands, and I began hearing from readers. One was pleased, though. “I was wondering when you would run out of things to say about groundhogs, and you finally did.”

This year I did receive some reminders to be sure and write the woodchuck column. One request was quite specific: “Would you reprint that song about Woodchuck Love?”

For those who came in late, I have been deriding and maligning and generally calling for the total eradication of woodchucks as long as I have been writing this column (and other columns read in other papers).

Bill Potter Photo

I used to urge people to get out there and plug the woodchuck holes, on or before February 1. But did they listen? Obviously not. Woodchucks are as numerous as ever. In warm weather any drive of more than five miles will provide proof of that in the form of flat fauna, road kill, on pavement and berm.

Yes, running over chucks is one good way to reduce the number, but they are annoyingly agile. Now and then a driver will actually try to avoid hitting a chuck, and will lose control of the vehicle, resulting in what police have taken to calling a “motor vehicle crash.”

Not only that, but there are chucks so big and tough, smaller cars don’t faze them. I know, because years ago, when my then husband and I were tooling along on Windfall Road in our little blue Simca, we ran over a formidable granddaddy woodchuck with the driver’s front tire, then with the back. Kabump, kerflump! Looking in the mirror, Don was about to stop and administer a coup de grace. But then we saw the chuck get up, shake itself off, give the Simca resentful glare and saunter off toward the pea patch it had been aiming for before the interruption.

There are burrowing creatures in other countries. In the British Isles there are badgers. Some say golf was invented by Scots who used their shillelaghs to knock sheep chips down badger holes.

Even in this region “hillside golf” and “cow pasture golf” had a brief period of popularity a few years ago. We might have thought that at long last groundhogs had done something marginally useful.

Kids like me, raised on dairy farms, knew the competitive side of sailing cow chips down holes with the aid of crooked sticks. We also despised woodchucks because of the damage they caused. The worst was that animals, and sometimes people, stepped into well concealed chuck holes and were injured. “Fitzsimmons lost a cow—broke a leg in a hole and had to be destroyed” was a typical oral report in the country store.

Did you ever wonder why we don’t have polo as a school sport? Perhaps it is because it would be dangerous for the polo ponies, and secondarily for the players, because the ponies could step in woodchuck holes, and riders could be thrown, ponies would break legs and have to be shot.

That was one drawback of the borrowed soccer field off Mill Street: chuck holes. And now that there is a new (temporary?) soccer field at Moose Park, they need to have a diligent woodchuck patrol unit in place. Chucks can create holes and tunnels between one afternoon’s practice and the next day’s game.

All that stuff about a well-ordered militia and the right to keep and bear arms? The NRA try to tell us that the colonials developed such principles in preparation for resisting the tyranny of English monarchs, and eventually throwing off the yoke. Now we need to be armed against possible repressions by the tyrants in Washington or the statehouse.

But I suspect woodchucks had a lot to do with that amendment, and still do. Not that it presents the best image of those who need guns for sport, to portray them as varmint plinkers. No, they are big game hunters and small game hunters. And while they may tell yarns about squirrels they shot at great distances while the squirrel was running at high speed, they never mention the woodchucks they shot racing from the garden to the hole in the hayfield.

The woodchuck’s mystical power to control weather has more believers than global warming, at least among Republican office holders. A community not far from here, with more consonants than any one community needs, has built an industry and its chief claim to fame on one cosseted marmot’s annual predictions, as interpreted by a keeper who is scared to death of him.

But before woodchucks were considered prognosticators of weather, it was the Old Bear. In letters to her son Howard, off in California, Nora Hall mentioned the Old Bear’s seeing or not seeing his shadow, on February 2, 1909 and 1910. Old Bear stories were in school “readers” of that time.

It isn’t just Punxsy Phil who might take umbrage at seeing his umbra on a sunny February 2 when he has broken his hibernation for no good reason. Could be any woodchuck, which is why my earlier campaigns urged plugging the holes temporarily. Since that was not working, I switched to a plea to just kill all the woodchucks. Poison gas, shooting them, using heat seeking missiles, whatever works.

Until that program succeeds, we are still at the mercy of Marmota monax. Cloud cover or lack of it on the crucial day would not, of itself, determine whether we are in for six weeks more of wintry discontent, or just a month and a half. No, it rests on the woodchuck’s response.

Peace (but never to woodchucks).