Whistle-Pig, Land Beaver, Monax: Every Woodchuck Nickname

Few animals have collected as many names as this one, and almost none of them are accurate. It is not a hog, not a beaver, not a badger, and it does not chuck wood.

Groundhog

The most widely used alternative, and the only one that is straightforwardly descriptive. Early English-speaking settlers saw a stocky, ground-dwelling animal with a substantial appetite and named it for what it appeared to be.

It is not a hog - it is a squirrel - but as folk naming goes, this one at least gets the ground part right.

Whistle-pig

The best name in the collection, and the most earned. Woodchucks produce a sharp, high alarm call when startled - a genuine whistle - which carries across a field and sends every other woodchuck within earshot down a hole.

The pig half is another borrowed livestock comparison. The whistle half is simply accurate reporting.

Land beaver

A comparison based on shape and habit rather than relationship. Both animals are heavy-bodied, brown, industrious and prone to remodelling the landscape, so the shorthand is understandable.

They are not related. Beavers and woodchucks sit in different rodent families, and only one of them has any interest in timber - which is precisely the confusion the tongue twister feeds on.

Monax and thickwood badger

Monax comes directly from the scientific name, Marmota monax, and turns up mostly in older natural-history writing.

Thickwood badger is a regional historical name that has largely fallen out of use. It is wrong twice over - not a badger, and not especially a creature of thick woods, since woodchucks prefer open edges.

And woodchuck itself

Which, as it turns out, is the least accurate name of the lot. It is a reshaped Algonquian word that originally referred to the fisher, an unrelated weasel-family animal, and neither wood nor chuck was ever part of its meaning.

An animal with six names, not one of them correct, is a fitting subject for a question that answers itself.

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