<html><body><span style="font-family:Verdana; color:#000000; font-size:10pt;">We are lucky enough to have an actual woodchuck in residence at Casa de Harriett. Or unlucky, if the woodchuck is the animal that recently stripped the bark off half of my peach tree, but the bark-stripping capability of the woodchuck is not the question here. The question is:<br><br>>So here goes...<br>
><br>
>Is the correct saying...<br>
>1) "How much wood WOULD a woodchuck chuck, if a woodchuck COULD chuck<br>
>wood?"<br>
>...OR...<br>
>2) "How much wood COULD a woodchuck chuck, if a woodchuck WOULD chuck<br>
>wood?"<br><br>The correct saying is option 1. This correctness is based on that being how I have always heard it. <br><br>Relevant experience with our resident woodchuck (or woodchucks...lacking the facilities to install and monitor radio ID collars on the woodchucks, I cannot confirm that there is only one, or that it has been the same woodchuck every year) indicates that if woodchucks do have wood-chucking capabilities, they are in no hurry to use them. Woodrow's burrow is located not 20 feet from a large pile of firewood the previous owners of the house left, and not a twig of it has ever been chucked. However, I did once catch the woodchuck inside the barn, among my hoard of cardboard boxes, and when I walked in, he chucked those right and left tearing hindquarters to get out of the barn. Corrugated cardboard is made of wood, so it seems that woodchucks, while not inclined to chuck raw wood, are willing and/or able to chuck wood in processed forms.<br><br>My observances of the woodchuck(s) also shows that, whatever their opinions of chucking wood are, they definitely have opinions regarding fruit. Woodrow prefers pears over apples. Every autumn, he fattens himself up for hibernation season on the windfall fruit in the orchard, 20 feet from his burrow in the opposite direction from the non-chucked woodpile. He will leave some apples on the ground, but not a pear.<br><br>Janet<br></span></body></html>