“How much wood could a woodchuck chuck, if a woodchuck could chuck wood?” It’s a classic question with a simple answer: The woodchuck, also known as a groundhog or marmot, is a close relative to the beaver: it looks roughly the same, but is about 1/5 the weight (10 pounds versus 50 pounds), and beavers do chuck wood, using their teeth to pull the logs and throw-pile it onto dams. I’ll call the tooth piling process chucking, since that’s what we would call it if a person did it by hand.
A beaver dam. From the size of this dam, and the rate of construction (one night) you can figure out how much wood a beaver could chuck, and from that how much a woodchuck could.
Based on the weight difference, my estimate is that a woodchuck would chuck about 1/5 as much wood as a beaver does. You might think this isn’t very much wood — and one “scientific” blogger claimed it would be less than 1/2 lb., but I’m certain he’s wrong. A beaver is able to build a dam like the one shown in a single night. Based on the size of the dam and the speed of building, we find that the beaver chucked about 1000 lbs of wood in a single night (beavers work at night). To figure out how much wood a woodchuck would chuck, divide this 5. I estimate that a woodchuck would chuck some 200 lbs per day, if it could and chose to.
Woodchucks don’t chuck wood, nor do they build dams or lodges. Instead they live in burrows in the ground. We have one living near my house. Woodchucks do kick up a lot of dirt digging a burrow, as much as 700 lb/day of dirt, but the question-language implies that this kicking activity should not be considered “chucking”. Well, now you know: it’s 200 lbs/night.
Robert Buxbaum. This post is revised January 30, 2020. My original estimate, from January 2013 was half the value here. I’d come to believe that wood-chucks/ groundhogs are 1/10 the size of a beaver, so I’d estimated 100 lb/night. I now know they are heavier.
