The Grad School Diaries: The Woodchuck Observation

I suppose that my reaction to seeing the woodchuck again – up close this time – might be considered a bit eccentric; it’s just that I had never seen one until we came to Michigan. I’d seen marmots in the Swiss Alps, ground squirrels in the Sierra Nevada, and chipmunks in the Rockies, but the famous American groundhog – famed in song, story and passable Bill Murray movies – was a new thing for me. I can honestly report that they’re visually appealing creatures, rather more like a long-bodied ground squirrel than any kind of hog I’ve ever seen, and once again I felt that sense of wonder at seeing something so familiar and yet totally new to me. It was a rare moment of peace and discovery, as my world expanded again. Although as it turns out, the sighting itself isn’t that unusual for Central Michigan…

I was never that much of a naturalist growing up; my interests lay more in fantastical beasties out of myth and legend, and later on ones with engines, made out of titanium and aluminum. I could tell you the life stories of dozens of aircraft families and hundreds of Advanced Dungeons and Dragons monsters by the time I was in middle school, but biology as such didn’t really interest me. I didn’t even have the dinosaurs phase most little boys go through. My memory of that time is hazy; I recall thinking that creatures that were dead and fossilized eons ago were all very well and good, but there were real, live astronauts landing on the moon when I was five, and supersonic airplanes flying around with the promise of Los Angeles to Paris in two hours soon to come, and that seemed far more exciting. I learned about great horned owls when one started roosting in the tree outside my window, eagles because they could fly, too, marmots when we saw them in Switzerland, and turtles just because they’re the coolest animals ever, but even trips to the zoo would only hold my attention for the time we were there…

It was only later, when I started getting into backpacking, mountaineering, and wilderness survival, that I really started to notice the creatures that share our world – and even then I was more interested in the behavior, descriptions and personalities than I was in how their hormones worked or how many stomachs they had. But when you’re trying to stay alive under adverse conditions with only the basic equipment you can conceal about your person stopping to admire the pretty birds and adorable mammals isn’t really high on your list, either. For many years the only notice I took of the wildlife around us was when I noticed that the sparrows that inundated our house in Redondo Beach were mating on a wire outside – or when something had flown into the window again…

Along with our arrival in Michigan came (almost from day one) a huge host of creatures, some familiar – like the wild geese that lived on the artificial lake next to the hotel we were staying in – and some not – like the goldfinches, which I’d read about but never seen before. We encountered three species of squirrel never seen west of the Rockies (and thus unfamiliar to me), wild rabbits quite different from our Western cottontails, a truly repulsive number of skunks, and the occasional hapless (and stupid) white-tailed deer, but then one day I saw a strange animal walking through our back yard. It wasn’t striped with white, so I knew it wasn’t a badger or a skunk; it was too wide to be a weasel, too small to be a wolverine, and too low to the ground to be a fox or a dog. I bought a field guild to mammals of Michigan, but it wasn’t until the late fall of our second year that I saw the creature again – when it wandered onto our back deck, apparently looking for food…

It has been said that travel is broadening, and that living in a new place will really change your perspective on the world. In most cases, I imagine, that aphorism is oriented toward great cities, cultural landmarks, museums, works of art, and learning opportunities – and, in fairness, I’ve had a few of those things over the years, too. But it must be acknowledged that sometimes the most amazing experiences of our lives, and the ones that help us reconnect to our sense of wonder and amazement, aren’t to be found in any tour book. Sometimes they just happen to amble onto your deck…