Something About Woodchucks

I got you, babe.

It's February and the month in which we should all read about The Figure in the Shadows. Click the title, it's a joke. Groundhogs are known by various names and it's one of those names - woodchuck - that brings to mind another joke:

How much wood would a woodchuck chuck if a woodchuck could chuck wood?

Or, as Father Foley asked in the climax of The Whistle, the Grave, and the Ghost (2003):

Quantum materiae materietur marmota monax si marmota monax materiam possit meteriari?

I didn’t know there was an answer:

...published by the Associated Press in 1988, which reported Richard Thomas , a New York fish and wildlife technician, calculated the volume of dirt in a typical 25-30-foot long woodchuck burrow and determined if the woodchuck had moved an equivalent volume of wood, it could move "about 700 pounds on a good day, with the wind at his back". Another study, which considered "chuck" to be the opposite of upchucking, determined that a woodchuck could ingest 361.9237001 cm3 of wood per day.

But who's counting?