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There are plenty of people out there to love whales and pandas. But what about woodchucks? I ask you. Who loves them?
How fuzzy wonderful do you have to be? How rare do you have to be before people notice you? Where are the woodchuck t-shirts, bumper stickers, and earrings?
My friend Margaret, a librarian in Goshen, loves them. She’s just wild about them. Out in the western U.S., people climb mountains just to see marmots. Oh, hurray, marmots! Watch them scamper up rocky slopes. Well, have you looked at a woodchuck?
It’s a marmot. It just lives in yards, fields, and woods.
My husband and I call them “yarmots,” a name drawn from yard marmot, our own personal term.
Come on, let’s appreciate the underappreciated. Okay, so they’ve eaten my garden a few times. But then I built the big, big, fence suggested by Rodale, the publishers of Organic Gardening. Oh, and I grew so many other plants that the woodchucks can eat, that they don’t think of the garden. They don’t even get around to it.
