Groundhogs have had a difficult year. Subject not only to the annual ritual of being thrust into the sky by bipedal primates who want them not to notice their own shadows, their burrows are being shot full of concrete, and one of their number may have been the victim of a conspiracy with New York mayor Bill de Blasio at its center. Now, yet another indignity has been visited upon the whistle-pigs: a bad joke by a New Hampshire police force that has issued “a warrant for Punxatawney Phil”.
In a truly desperate gamble to lighten the mood in snowbound Merrimack, New Hampshire, the town’s police department wrote on Facebook that “we have received several complaints from the public that this little varmint is held up in a hole, warm and toasty.” The post continues to say that the groundhog predicted six weeks of winter but “failed to disclose that it would consist of mountains of snow!”
New England has been breaking winter storm records for the last two weeks, and some areas have seen more than 6ft of snow. More snow is forecast before the weekend.
“If you see him, do not approach him as he is armed and dangerous,” the police wrote, apparently referring to the fact that groundhogs have legs and a propensity to bite humans who grab them. “Call Merrimack police, we will certainly take him into custody,” they conclude, seemingly eager for anyone to call at all.
Then they posted a picture of the gopher puppet from the Bill Murray film Caddyshack, which features no groundhogs.
On 2 February another woodchuck had a run-in with the law, when Jon Freund, the mayor of Sun Prairie, Wisconsin, tried to make Jimmy the groundhog “whisper” his seasonal forecast into his ear. Jimmy proceeded to bite Freund.
The local Milwaukee-Wisconsin Journal Sentinel immediately investigated the altercation with the energy of a conspiracy theorist taking on the JFK assassination, announcing: “Wisconsin’s best known rodent [had] opened up a can of Mike Tyson on the mayor.” Freund pardoned the groundhog at the subsequent city council meeting.
The human tradition of looking to animal prognosticators is old and varied, ranging from the snakes and rats said to vanish before earthquakes to the cat that “predicted 50 deaths” in a Rhode Island nursing home. The ritual of Groundhog Day began in the mid-1800s and was attributed to German immigrants in central Pennsylvania, whose fairy tales and traditions came down from Celtic and central European lore about badgers and bears.
Those forebears would likely be glad to see the inexorable march of technology has not dimmed mankind’s enthusiasm for the questions that vexed them. How much wood could a woodchuck chuck? Do animals really tell the future? Statisticians were put to the case, and delivered pronouncements from on high. A woodchuck can chuck “361.9237001 cubic centimeters of wood per day”. A groundhog “is just a groundhog”.
