The Rise of the Woodchuck

When I was a boy growing up in Mattituck, across the bay, there were only a handful of woodchucks on the North Fork.

I saw my first on the other side of a wire fence on my grandfather’s chicken farm on “pick chickens” Saturday in the summer of 1942, when I was 6. It looked at me quizzically as I stared at it, then turned and retreated.

I didn’t see another until I was 17. It was on Ralph Tuthill’s dairy farm at the edge of a brush pile, apparently its home.

It was in the 1990s when I saw several woodchucks occupying a piece of topographically irregular land on the north side of Sound Avenue in Riverhead farm country. Every once in a while thereafter, I would come across a woodchuck, the last at a home in Montauk only a few years ago.

Woodchucks have been few and far between here on the East End of Long Island. I have been keeping track of roadkill species since the mid-1970s and have never recorded a single woodchuck.

This year, I heard of another, the closest to my home of all. It was on the Karl and Janet Grossman property, also on Noyac Road, only a half mile from my house. The Grossmans invited me to lunch to see it.

This woodchuck had several friends — deer, foxes, squirrels and the like — and would run from one edge of the Grossman property to the other without stopping.

I sat there in amazement. It was the first time that I was able to watch a woodchuck go about its business for more than a minute or two, and I watched it come and go for almost an hour.

I couldn’t tell the sex of the Grossman woodchuck, but just to see one only 50 feet away and for such a long time was a thrill. The Grossmans are very active environmentalists and were as excited at having added a woodchuck to their native fauna as I was looking at it.

Just as Long Island’s flying squirrels have only been on the South Fork for a comparatively short time, woodchucks have only been here since the 1980s or 1990s. Lately, there are more and more reports of them, and the one seen in Montauk a few years ago means they probably now occur throughout.

Chipmunks have been in Southampton and East Hampton since I’ve lived here, now 40 years running, but flying squirrels? Not until the 1980s. It is argued by some that wildlife trappers caught them on the other side of the Shinnecock Canal and let them go here, but just the opposite is believed to be more likely.

Woodchucks are Long Island’s only true hibernators. When they go under in the late fall, their breathing and other body functions drop to near zero and remain near zero until they finally wake up and emerge in the next year.

There are other Long Island mammals — for example, chipmunks — that resort to living underground in the winter, but they don’t really hibernate; they remain active and live off their caches of stored nuts and other food items.

And, like Punxsutawney Phil in Pennsylvania, a few of our woodchucks are being treated just like Phil in order to announce the coming of spring.