February is used to reestablish the bonds necessary for mating and ensures that mating can then proceed without delay in early March.“ They aggressively maintain a feeding territory around their burrows and rarely have any contact with each other.
According to an article in, “Most of the year, male and female groundhogs are solitary and antagonistic against each other. They are trying to ‘collect data” to determine if there is another groundhog in the area to mate with when March rolls around. Groundhogs emerge in February to analyze the mating landscape. GROUNDHOG DATA COLLECTION AND ADVERTISING However, they are adorable!īy the way, why do groundhogs pop up in the middle of their hibernation to take a peak outside? In a way, it’s all about research and advertising. Groundhogs are not good predictors of future weather. Considering the silly notion that the groundhog’s seeing his shadow can somehow predict future weather, 40% accuracy is not too shabby in my opinion. In the article, “How accurate is Punxsutawney Phil?”, posted by EarthSky in Human World, according to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, from 2008 to 2018, our groundhog friend has only been accurate 40% of the time. How accurate are weather predictions made by folks who try to base future weather patterns on whether this little critter sees his shadow? I know it’s just for fun. Somehow, I feel like six more weeks of winter is a given. Therefore, we have six more weeks of winter weather, by some predictions. (According to legend, Punxsutawney Phil is more than 125 years old thanks to the magical punch he imbibes every summer.On Tuesday of this week, Punxsutawney Phil saw his shadow. They grow up to 25 inches long and can live for 10 years in captivity. Groundhog FactsĪlso known as woodchucks, groundhogs belong to a group of large ground squirrels known as marmots.
More than 100,000 people attend the town’s Woollybear Festival, held every fall since 1972.īut woolly bear caterpillars aren’t the best prognosticators, either: While their bands may vary from year to year, researchers have found the variation is due to last year’s weather, not the upcoming winter. According to tradition, if the bugs have more orange than black coloring in autumn, the upcoming winter will be mild. What About Woolly Bears?įor the last 30 years, residents of Vermillion, Ohio, have turned to a very different creature for their annual weather forecast: the woolly bear caterpillar. Staten Island Chuck, on the other hand, is reportedly accurate almost 80 percent of the time. Studies by the National Climatic Data Center and the Canadian weather service have yielded a dismal success rate of around 50 percent for Punxsutawney Phil. While sunny winter days are indeed associated with colder, drier air, we probably shouldn’t trade in our meteorologists for groundhogs just yet.
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