by Zachary Cook
*sigh*...how much wood could a woodchuck chuck if a woodchuck could chuck wood?
Well, that depends on several factors...but my estimate would be an average of 1,800 lbs of wood a day.
Let’s look at why.
There are plenty of articles that ponder this question. And many articles that try to answer it! But those articles seem to all copy one fact, and try to paste it as the answer. Many articles you can find will say that the woodchuck could chuck around 700 pounds of wood. They say this because that’s the average amount of dirt that they move (not chuck, you will see the importance of this later) to make their burrow. But if you have ever moved dirt and moved wood, you know that they behave completely differently when under motion. So I don’t find this estimate very accurate.
But wait, burrow? Not a dam in a river made of wood?
Yes, burrow. Like where a groundhog lives. Not a beaver.
Here’s something that you may not know. The woodchuck and the groundhog are very closely related. In fact, they’re the same exact thing! Yup. The subject of the famous tongue-twister and the shadow-watcher Punxsutawney Phil are one and the same. Who woulda thunk it?
So let’s set the question...If P. Philly had a full-time job chucking wood (minus the one day he has to look for his shadow), how much wood could he chuck?
Well like I said above, that depends on several factors: definition of a “chuck”, the weight of the wood, length of Phil’s workday, and how much does Phil need to sleep/eat/drink/etc. All of these things we need to take into account to truly determine the answer to the popular tongue-twister. Let’s start from the top.
What exactly is a chuck? What makes it different than a throw or toss?
Well, most dictionaries describe it as a throw (Merriam-Webster, n.d.). But as someone who has done his fair share of throwing/tossing/chucking different objects, I feel as if there are different words to describe the distance/weight of what’s being thrown. Let’s look at this graph I put together to make things a bit more clearer.
If you are struggling to understand this graph, let me point out some of the trends.
First off, if you ignore the outlier of catapult, the trend of the graph is that the heavier the object is, the shorter it is thrown. With that said, just because something is light, doesn't mean that it is always thrown far (ie. Toss and Lob). Think about some of the terms in real life:
You would fling a frisbee and, if you are a decent flinger, it would go a good distance.
You pitch a baseball, but it usually stops due to either the catcher catching the ball or the batter hitting it.
You toss your keys to someone on the other side of the car. It’s very lightweight but usually goes a very short distance.
You heave your heavy suitcase onto the bed after a long trip.
So where does that leave chuck?
As you can see, I put chuck towards the heavier side and just shy of halfway up the graph for distance thrown. It is an action that is usually used on fairly heavy objects to get an object somewhat far. Imagine chucking a heavy brick through a window. Just imagine, please. Don’t actually chuck bricks through windows. That’s bad.
This graph shows why the estimation of chucking 700 lbs of wood is (probably) inaccurate. Phil isn’t chucking dirt out of his hole. It would fall towards being more of a flinging or tossing action.
But wait just a second. Just because something is light for me to move, doesn’t mean it is light for someone/something else!
Correct. The adjective heavy or light is all relative to the amount of muscle someone/something has and how that someone/something uses that muscle. For example: I can put my SUV in neutral and push it fairly easily on a flat plane, but for my two-year-old toddler, this would seem like an impossible feat. So what weight would a piece of wood have to be to fall into the chuck action for our friend Phil?
Let’s discuss.
The average weight of an American male is around 200 lbs (Healthline, 2019). The Jumbo Standard red brick weighs around 5.9 lbs on average (but we will round to an even 6 lbs) (Belden Brick Company, n.d.). The brick is about 3% the weight of the chucker. So if we take that number, we can determine how heavy a piece of wood needs to be, to be considered a chuck for a woodchuck. All we need is to know how much Mr. Phil weighs.
Well as luck would have it, Phil has his own webpage! Looking at the webpage https://www.groundhog.org/phil-faq, it shows us a crazy amount of info about the beloved groundhog. Everything from his love life, to his correct prediction percentage (which is obviously 100%), to even that he has discovered the Fountain of Youth! But the most important stat that we need for this question is his weight!
The website states that Phil’s weight fluctuates all year round, ranging anywhere from 11-17 lbs. But for our question today, we’re going to assume that Phil is on the heavier side. So around 17 lbs. So with that number and the 3% number from a second ago, the required weight of the wood would be around 0.5 lbs.
Now, yes, that seems very light. But remember, Phil is about the size of a year-old toddler. So do this for me, find a one-year-old, hand them a roll of quarters (weighs .5 lbs), measure how far they can chuck it. As you can see, this seems somewhat heavy for that toddler. Chances are, they didn’t get it very far. But this scenario is a good way to imagine Phil chucking half a pound of wood.
Let’s see where we are.
Understanding of the word chuck: check
The weight of the wood: check
The length of Phil’s workday: not check
Does Phili-buster work a full 8 hr workday? How do we know?
Well here is we run into the issue with the whole “Punxsutawney Phil” illustration. You see, non-celebratory groundhogs/woodchucks hibernate from October until early March (Wildlife Informer, n.d.). But our big shot Phil doesn’t hibernate (The Punxsutawney Phil Club, n.d.)! Therefore, if we were to continue using Dr. Phil as our example, we would be getting skewed numbers! So do we continue following Philly-cheesecake or start following a regular old groundhog? Well…
Good call girl from the classic taco shell commercial!
As we can read from Wildlife Informer, Woodchucks are diurnal. Or, in other terms, they sleep at night and are active during the day (Wildlife Informer, n.d.). What other creatures do this? Humans! And you know what the convenient thing is about humans, they have a pretty good grasp on what the average full-time workday should look like! While, yes, there is some push to go to four-day workweeks, the average has been 8 hr days, 5 days a week!
So if we take what we know about one diurnal creature’s work schedule (humans), and apply it to another diurnal creature (woodchucks), we can assume that Phil-of-the-Future will be working 8 hours a day! This will give woodchucks as a whole enough time to rest, sleep, eat, build a burrow, and form a family while working full-time. Again, the question is: How much wood could a woodchuck chuck. Sure a woodchuck could work for 12 hour days, head home, eat, sleep, and repeat. But that could eventually lead to a decrease in drive and possibly depression and ultimately not working at all. So we are going to stick with the recommended 8 hr workdays to ensure the possibility to be happy and motivated throughout the day.
Okay now to the big question, how much wood could a woodchuck chuck in an 8 hr workday?
Here is my estimation and analysis. I'm around the average weight of an American male according to the site above (Healthline, 2019), so finding how often I can chuck a brick while going at a pace that I can sustain for a full 8-hour workday (obviously with breaks) should give us a rough estimate on how much a woodchuck could do doing the same.
But we run into one inconsistency...opposable thumbs.
Humans, like us, have the glorious gift of opposable thumbs! This allows us to grab, manipulate, twist, etc. many different things. Unfortunately, woodchucks don't have this luxury. So to be as accurate as possible when doing the test I talked about a minute ago, I didn’t use my thumbs to grab the bricks. This forced me to use both hands on every brick, which made it significantly more tiring. But here is the results I came up with:
1 brick every 8 seconds.
Now, if you attempt to do this experiment, you may find that this is somewhat slow. But we’re looking at the average throughout the entire day. At some points, you may get a burst of energy and do 1 brick every few seconds, but that isn’t sustainable for long periods of time. Other times, you may start to get out of breath and have to take a short breather and not do any bricks for several minutes. So it evens out at about 1 brick every 8 seconds, or, 450 bricks an hour, or even better yet, 3,600 every 8 hr workday.
AND WITH THIS ESTIMATE, we can safely assume that a woodchuck can chuck around 3,600 half-pound pieces of wood every day! In other terms, that is 1,800 pounds of wood a day per woodchuck!
Let’s compare Punxy Brewster to the average woodchuck.
If Phil followed the same average number of workdays that humans do, he would chuck wood for 250 days minus 1 (for groundhogs day) according to the number of working days in 2021 (workingdays.us, 2021)
This means Phil can chuck 224 tons of wood every year. This is just slightly more than the estimated 700 lbs from other estimates.
But what about a woodchuck that hibernates?
A hibernating woodchuck would only work about 150 working days per year (workingdays.us, 2021). This means the normal woodchuck could chuck 135 tons of wood a year. Still a tad bit above 700 lbs.
So there you go! The answer to the age-old question!
But wait! How much would a woodchuck earn for his work?
*sigh*
The only profitable way for a woodchuck to sell half-pound pieces of wood would be in the form of firewood. In the state of Pennsylvania (where Phil lives), the only legal way to sell firewood is by the “Cord”. A cord of wood is a stack measuring 4 ft by 8 ft with each piece of wood being 4 feet long. So our woodchucks would most definitely have to skirt around pieces of wood being 4 feet long, but they can take it up with the authorities there.
A cord of wood weighs anywhere between 2000-3000 lbs (We Supply Mulch and Firewood, 2020). The average price of a cord of wood in Pennsylvania in 2019 was $225 (Penn State, 2019).
So taking these numbers, Phil would earn about $50,400 a year or $25.30 an hour (maybe I need to get into the wood chucking business). And the average woodchuck would earn $30,375 a year and the same 25.30 an hour.
I really thought about dabbling into what lifestyle a woodchuck could live with that salary, but I’m forgoing that because...well....this is already ridiculous enough.
So to wrap this all up:
The average woodchuck could chuck around 135 tons of wood a year, earning a comfortable $25.30 an hour.
There is your answer!
Now, if you excuse me, I am going to go get my honorary wood-chucking degree from Penn State.
Stay salty.
Bibliography
Belden Brick Company. (n.d.). Brick Dimensions Guide. Belden. Retrieved April 19, 2021, from https://www.beldenbrick.com/brick-dimensions-guide.asp
Healthline. (2019, Feb. 27). What's the Average Weight for Men? Healthline. Retrieved April 19, 2021, from https://www.healthline.com/health/mens-health/average-weight-for-men
Merriam-Webster. (n.d.). Definition of Chuck. Merriam-Webster. Retrieved April 18, 2021, from https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/chuck
Penn State. (2019, October 18). Firewood Prices Continue to be Competitive. PennState Extension. Retrieved April 20, 2021, from https://extension.psu.edu/firewood-prices-continue-to-be-competitive
The Punxsutawney Phil Club. (n.d.). Phil - FAQ. The Punxsutawney Phil Club. Retrieved April 19, 2021, from https://www.groundhog.org/phil-faq
We Supply Mulch and Firewood. (2020). What Size is a Cord of Firewood? Wesupplyli. Retrieved April 20, 2021, from https://www.wesupplyli.com/what-size-is-a-cord-of-firewood/#:~:text=How%20much%20does%20a%20cord,from%202000%20to%203000%20pounds.
Wildlife Informer. (n.d.). Are Groundhogs Nocturnal or Diurnal? Wildlife Informer. Retrieved April 19, 2021, from https://wildlifeinformer.com/are-groundhogs-nocturnal/
workingdays.us. (2021). How Many Working Days and Public Holidays. Working Days. Retrieved April 20, 2021, from https://www.workingdays.us/workingdays_holidays_2021.htm
Comments