Woodchuck filmed chucking wood

In Science and Technology on Friday, 6 January 2012

A BBC wildlife team member gets close enough to a woodchuck to watch it chuck wood

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Dramatic footage has been released of a Woodchuck chucking wood, settling the age-old question of just how much wood a Woodchuck would chuck if, indeed, it were a possibility that a Woodchuck could, as it were, chuck wood.

The footage, filmed by the BBC Natural History team, is part of a ground-breaking new natural history documentary series ‘Life in the Woods’ to be shown on our screen later in the year.

The Woodchuck is a small mammal also known as a Groundhog, or Small-Furry-Bastard. The team filmed the Woodchuck, known as Wantic Frank, in the wild in its natural environment of a zoo in Warwickshire.

So how much wood can a Woodchuck chuck? Woodchucks are not usually renowned for their tendency to chuck wood, hence the popular tongue-twister. Due to their small stature it was obvious that any wood that a Woodchuck could, or indeed would chuck would be small. Should the Woodchuck chuck wood then with luck the Woodchuck would be filmed chucking the wood, if it could. After 3 years of pluck and luck, stuck in the corner of his enclosure, the film-crew finally filmed Wantic Frank chucking a piece of wood weighing in at a incredible 27 grams. With the Woodchuck’s weight (or as pedants would tell us ‘mass’) being 3.12 kg (equivalent to 1300 millionths of an elephant) this is the equal to an 11 stone man throwing a piece of wood weighing 0.6 kg (equivalent to a decent sized block of cheese from Tescos’s).

Whilst the BBC film crew were patting themselves on the back at their ground(hog)-breaking discovery the internet has already been humming with rumours that Wantic Frank is in fact 80’s wife-swap scandal faux-child Jimmy Krankie in a furry costume.

We phoned Dickie Attenborough for a comment, hoping he was at home for once and not perched on some godforsaken glacier looking elderly and vulnerable. He told us “I do believe, my dear chap, that you meant to phone my brother. He’s very much into all this wildlife stuff, don’t you know. I did however appear with a delightful Scottish accent in that successful film with the dinosaurs in it, if you’ll remember. Oh they were real darlings in real life – I was so sad when they got typecast in the sequels. Such is life.”