Rodents of Unusual Size

Do you know what a woodchuck is? I didn't, not really, before this year; I had vague notions of how much wood one could chuck, and thought it might be similar to that other famous odd creature, the ground hog. (In fact, they are the same, and are also known, according to the great prevaricators at Wikipedia as, get this, whistlepigs.) But this year--they're everywhere. They've chewed the boards at the bottom of one of our barns; they dash across the road in front of the car nearly as often as the little chipmunks, who always seem anxious, as they stiffly hold their tails high and run so fast their feet are a blur. As some of them seem to be about three feet long, they are, indeed, ROUS's.