Very short little book about how the author found an orphaned woodchuck and cared for it. She raised it in her house, then moved it to a hole outside by a stone wall on the property, then eventually had to trap and relocate it further away because it kept coming back for handouts! Getting the woodchuck to find and eat wild foods on its own seemed the hardest part. I often see woodchucks in the roadside verges here, and thought of them as just big fat ground squirrels. Which they are. But it was nice to learn a little more about them, and reflect on how beautiful the author eventually found them to be, in their own way. The middle of the book switches from the personal story about this one woodchuck, to share information the author learned via her library research, then it goes back to tell how the woodchuck was finally returned to the wild. The illustrations by Darby Morrell are just exquisite.
Rating: 3/5
40 pages, 1992
2 Responses
Awww, I’m so glad this worked out! I feel like if I tried to rescue a woodchuck, I would screw up and in the end the woodchuck would be dead and I would feel so so guilty. Congrats to this lady for her competence hahahaha.
It sounded like she already had some experience rescuing wild animals, but yeah!