Carefree prairie dog rescued from Pennsylvania house fire

upi ^ | March 10, 2017 | Daniel Uria

[exDemMom]

I was making a joke, since “groundhog” and “woodchuck” are exactly the same animal. The proper name for them is “marmot.”

In Mongolia, they eat them. I was spared the experience, however, since the Mongolians apparently find them so delicious that they barely exist outside of protected parks.

[imardmd1]

I knew you were joking, and so was I, sort of. I was raised in the country, in small villages in Western New York State. English children's stories like "Alice in Wonderland" told of "hedgehogs," and I thought they might be something like a little woodchuck. But until many years later, when I went to a large university in an upstate city, I had never heard of "groundhogs." There is where I met New York City people (not to be mentioned in the same breath as upstate New Yorkers), who were like another separate division of the human race, and spoke another language, pronounced differently, and they talked of "groundhogs" as well as other things I had never heard of.

So, I was just pulling your leg a bit when I told you that in the part of the farm country that I grew up, there were no groundhogs, only pesky woodchucks. But that is true. Nobody there to this day speaks of groundhogs when they want to go out woodchuck huntin,' after the fields are mown and the hay brought in, before the fall plowing begins. That's when these crop- and equipment-damaging rodents can't hide in tall grass any longer.

At least, that's the way it was 60 or 70 years ago, back in the day.

[exDemMom]

When I was growing up in California, I knew woodchucks only because of the tongue twister, and had heard of groundhogs only because of groundhog day. It wasn’t until I had lived back east for several years that I finally found out what a groundhog looks like, and several years later when I learned that a woodchuck is exactly the same animal.