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I come from a place without woodchucks (or groundhogs, or whistlepigs, or whatever you prefer to call them). Now I live in a place where I get to watch them root and run around and sun themselves from my office window, or on dog walks. This is an exciting novelty for me. I’ve been looking for a book to learn more about these funny, personable little creatures, and I’ve been having kind of a hard time, but I did finally find this 1966 publication, The World of the Woodchuck (part of a series, A Living World Books, from J. B. Lippincott).

It’s a fairly simple collection of naturalist knowledge about woodchucks, part of the family Sciuridae (tree squirrels, ground squirrels, flying squirrels), genus Marmota, group monax. (My local species is the Marmota monax monax, or Maryland woodchuck.) W.J. Schoonmaker (zoologist, photographer, illustrator, educator, and lifelong resident of New York state) compiles all the information he can find in chapters titled “Meet the Woodchuck,” each of the four seasons, “Relation to Man and Other Animals,” and more. His writing style is mostly straightforward, a comprehensive catalog of stories and facts from his own considerable observation of woodchucks (and other animals) and the work of other naturalists and farmers, hunters and friends. He has a clear affection for his subject, when he describes them smiling and showing fear and love, or telling stories like the “comedy” of a black dachshund that chased a woodchuck and then got chased in turn.

I am left with a similar affection for Schoonmaker, who can be unintentionally funny (noting that three chucks he found with overgrown incisors were each “alive when killed”). The book is definitely dated in its language and style, and perhaps in its emphasis on the question of whether wild animals are useful to humans in terms of hunting, farming, and recreation – we have only partially moved past that perspective, but this does feel like the perspective of an earlier era in ecology. However, Schoonmaker observes, “It is believed that every plant and animal fits somewhere in the great plan of Nature, and the woodchuck definitely occupies an ecological niche in this scheme.” I can’t say if the body of knowledge about woodchucks has expanded since this book was published, but I have been looking in vain for more to read about them, so The World of the Woodchuck may remain the authoritative monograph on this subject. I learned a fair amount. The chambers of a woodchuck burrow adhere to dimensions with variation of only an inch or so between individuals (even individuals of different sizes). Woodchucks can climb trees, and they both ascend and descend headfirst. They hibernate in winter (I last observed my across-the-street neighbor on November 10, which is kind of late – we had a warm fall here). They are herbivores, and playful as puppies when they’re young, although they have to spend a lot of time eating and thus less time playing than a puppy does – it takes a lot of eating to prepare for hibernation on the caloric content of alfalfa and clover. They can eat a third of their weight at a time.

This book is no great work of research or fine writing, but it gave me what I needed, with a charming authorial voice and plenty of pictures. I’m glad I found it.

Filed under: book reviews | Tagged: nature, nonfiction |