Our own Pine Tree State has no officially recognized, meteorologically minded woodchuck predicting spring’s arrival each year such as Ohio’s Buckeye Chuck, Nova Scotia’s Shubenacadie Sam or Pennsylvania’s Punxsutawney Phil.
Instead, we just wait and see if the eventual thaw comes early or late. Which is fine. There’s nothing we can do about it, anyway.
However, we do have an actual groundhog expert in our midst and she’s got plenty to say about the fascinating, often overlooked rodents more famous here for raiding vegetable gardens than forecasting weather.
Christine Maher is professor of biology and dean of the College of Science, Technology, and Health at the University of Southern Maine. Maher has a Ph.D in animal behavior and a M.S. in zoology.
She’s been studying the same group of Falmouth groundhogs — or woodchucks, as we tend to call them in Maine — for almost 30 years.
“There’s one female in particular that I started studying way back in 1998,” Maher said. “There were seven generations of descendants I was able to keep track of until that lineage died out in 2019.”
That first lady woodchuck alone produced 37 pups — or chucklings, as they’re also known — and the family grew exponentially from there.
Maher’s scientific research revolves around how different woodchuck populations are more, or less, social. In most places they’re quite solitary, but Maher discovered that the woodchucks she watched tended to hang around together, near the place where they were born, especially the females.
“So, there might be a mother surrounded by her daughters, by her granddaughters, by aunts, by cousins,” Maher said. “They actually treated their relatives nicer than they would treat their non-relatives — kind of like people.”
Maher admits she’s quite used to getting calls around Feb. 2 every year from people looking for quick, impressive woodchuck facts. That’s why she’s always got a few handy. Here are five.
Number one: Maine woodchucks hibernate half their lives. Going to ground early, in mid-September, they don’t usually emerge from their burrows until six months later, in late March.
“Once they’re fat enough, they go down into their burrows, probably because it’s safer,” Maher said. “There’s no predators down there.”
Number two: Speaking of fat, woodchucks have to double their weight every year because they burn half of it while staying warm during the winter.
“When they come out of hibernation, an adult will weigh around two-and-a-half kilograms,” Maher said, “and by the time they go back into hibernation at the end of the summer, they weigh maybe five or even six kilograms.”
Number three: Their favorite food — other than your prized tomatoes — are dandelions.
“And clover. They love clover, too,” Maher said. “They’re not eating grass.”
Number four: Some woodchucks in Maine can be black, rather than brown.
“It’s called melanism. It’s just a genetic thing, a mutation in the genes,” Maher said. “At one point, pretty close to 15 percent of the [Falmouth] population was melanistic.”
Number five: Just for the record, though they are fascinating, woodchucks have no ability to predict the weather. Groundhog Day is just the North American version of an older pagan holiday from Europe marking the halfway point between the winter solstice and the spring equinox.
“In Europe, they used badgers as their weather predictor,” Maher said, “Because it’s the time of year they’d be emerging from their burrows.”
However, without any badgers in sight when they arrived in the New World, migrants from the Old Country chose woodchucks as their new springtime prognosticators, whether they wanted the job or not. Ever notice how annoyed that Pennsylvania woodchuck looks when they haul him out of the stump every year?
“No self-respecting Maine woodchuck is ever going to be up and out of its burrow on February 2,” Maher said. “It’s still way too cold for that.”
