For Chuck on his 70th birthday
I learned from Amy Leach’s delightful “The Salt of the Universe” book that a baby groundhog is called a “chuckling.”
That’s much cuter than the expletives I used to let fly when the coterie of chucklings devoured my garden like fuzzy lawnmowers.
There are coyote whelps, wolf whelps, otter whelps, and probably many otter — I mean, other, examples just like there are a bunch of species with calves and cubs. An armadillo is about as different from a bat as an animal can be, yet both babies are called pups. Same with sharks and walruses. Pups all around!
But a platypus begats a puggle — truly, everything about a platypus is unique. From bill to tail, pouch to puggles, such a special creature.
You probably knew that a baby pig is a piglet, but did you realize that a baby hedgehog is a hoglet? Technically, piglets can also be called shoats. A sheep-goat hybrid is also called a shoat or a geep. I kid you not — about goats, at least.
An ephyra is a jellyfish larva named after the water-nymph daughters of the Greek titans, Oceanus and Tethys, who were also brother and sister. Some jellies are hermaphrodites, but others have a sexual stage and are known as medusas. Jellyfish seem to evoke Greek mythology when it comes to classification and naming. Fascinating stuff.
Baby llamas and baby alpacas are both known as crias, which is Spanish for “baby animal.” ¡Eso es muy lindo! And, speaking of cute, a baby porcupine is a porcupette, a diminutive form of the word for the mature adult, which returns me to the garden-chomping baby groundhogs.
My father-in-law goes by Chuck, so I now think of his five grandkids as “Chuck-lings,” and three of them are currently eating their mother and me out of our house and home. Once a chuckling, always a chuckling.
Andrew Taylor-Troutman is the author of “Little Big Moments,” a collection of mini-essays about parenting, and “Tigers, Mice & Strawberries: Poems.” Both titles are available most anywhere books are sold online. Taylor-Troutman lives in Chapel Hill where he serves as pastor of Chapel in the Pines Presbyterian Church and occasionally stumbles upon the wondrous while in search of his next cup of coffee.
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