Groundhog Day—Is There Merit in the Myth?!
February 2nd every year, we drag a rodent out of its burrow in Punxsutawney, Pennsylvania to forecast the nation’s winter weather. If the rodent (traditionally named Phil) is frightened by his own shadow, we are told, he returns to his burrow and resumes hibernation — and then we mere mortals must endure the full length of winter. If Phil does not see his shadow, he ends his hibernation and we can expect an early spring.
Wait! What?!
This very odd and arcane ritual smacks of hocus-pocus shrouded in witchery. How can any rodent forecast the weather? What do shadows cast or not of groundhogs have to do with an early spring? Was this whole thing made up after many hours of drinking in a beer-soaked bar a few miles north by northwest of Altoona as a practical joke on the rest of us?
Fortunately for this article, I am old enough to remember the serious business of prognosticating the elements before our relatively accurate modern weather reports… Seven day weather forecasting. Imagine that! Wow!
Back in the day when wheels were still square our mostly agrarian society relied heavily on stepping out of doors and scanning the sky. Dark clouds gathering on the western horizon, for instance, meant that a storm was rolling in and the general advice was to stay indoors or to bundle up for the day and carry an umbrella.
Of course we heard iffy three-day weather reports on the radio which, at that time, was the only media outlet for broadly casting messages instantly. The daily newspaper was still in sway but the paper was printed the day before and the daily forecast was customarily wrong.
When I was nine and in the fifth grade in 1955 our family got our first TV (a 13-inch B&W Super V Crosley Tabletop model). My childhood recollection was that the news and the weather broadcasts were not tied together like they are today, nor bundled with sports and traffic. We had about 15-minutes each evening of TV news weekdays and about 1 minute of weather. (Also, commercial breaks back then lasted only one-minute long.) So we still relied mostly on the radio for the important reports.
By the by, I watched Elvis’ historic debut on the Ed Sullivan Show (Sept 9, 1956) on that TV set.
Without all the modern instant up-to-the-minute news and weather in your face on every platform, you can understand why farmers, and others, relied so heavily on rapidly disappearing folklore to predict the weather — folklore as found in Poor Richard’s Almanac (1732 — 1758) published by weather pioneer Benjamin Franklin, himself, then later in the David Young’s Farmers’ Almanac (1818 — present) and every other almanac since. The almanac’s collective wisdom was essential to guiding, for one example, our intrepid farmers —including my grandparents — as to when to plant which crops and when to bring them in. Getting it wrong by misreading nature’s cues and missing the optimal planting time could endanger the seasonal crop, the farmers’ own food supplies and their farms major income for the year.
Forecasting the start of spring is what this groundhog business is all about.
Intrigued by this adage as a child, I pestered my farmer grandfather asking whether it were true. I was reassured that it was indeed accurate… enough. One needed any number of sightings and applied rules-of-thumb, which collectively added up to quasi-reliable indicators. The predictions of your local Groundhog’s Day means little until you start to add in other little bits of information: dark clouds on the horizon, say, and|or early buds on a fruit tree, and|or shoots of grass pushing thru the snow on the south side of a hill, and|or birds starting to build nests, and other tidbits of nature all combined to give assurances that you do|don’t have to ready the plow for spring planting. To this day I still do not know how my wizened old grandfather could predict the coming of storms better than the radio all year round.
While acknowledging the seriousness of divining spring’s coming, let us deconstruct this Groundhog Day ritual and see where its usefulness lies.
First, the day: Why February 2nd? That day happens to be smack dab in the middle of winter, so this is a critical day. In general, each of the four seasons every year —determined by Earth’s tilt with respect to the Sun —are approximately three months long, or eighty-nine or ninety days each. Winter starts at the winter solstice on December 21st or 22nd and ends with the start of spring equinox around March 20th. Mid-winter is 45-days in, which is February 3rd. What?! My guess is that they used goat powered calculators back when. In reality, pinning nature’s own fury to any human date reckoning is iffy at best. The one day off might have significance I don’t know about. But it is still midwinter.
So the importance of Groundhog Day is to remind everyone that it is time to start looking for spring’s harbinger storms. Storm clouds before midwinter often simply means more, well, winter storms.
Next, the location: Why Punxsutawney PA? The old rule of thumb was meant to be applied locally wherever one happens to be… it is not applicable nationally when taken from any one spot. The adage says nothing about Pennsylvania. In fact, the modern observance sprang from old roots — long before Pennsylvania was founded. Punxsutawney is not at all special, except to the people who live there. Oh yes, that and Gobbler’s Knob (in Punxsutawney) being the site where the first official Groundhog Day was celebrated in 1887. So they have a claim on the day. And since your community didn’t throw its own 10-minute long miniature Rose Bowl Parade-like festivities, you looked in on Punxsutawney’s party, yourself. Now, fortified by the movie of the same name, Groundhog Day has become a yearly national event that pops up for a clip-and-blurb on the evening news.
Now, the rodent: What’s so important about a groundhog? Nothing, actually. It could have just as easily been a marmot, if Punxsutawney was west of the Rockies. As such, the source of the shadows mean nothing — although natural groundhog, a.k.a. woodchuck, behavior lends itself quite nicely to our ritual*. This adage is still accurate if you substituted your dog’s shadow or your own… or the trees across the street so you don’t have to actually go outdoors into the cold weather in the dead of winter.
(What does it say about groundhog reproduction if only the males emerge in February to look for mates?)
Finally, the shadow: What’s so important about a marmot’s shadow? This folksy algorithm is all about shadows, not critters. Or rather, it is about the sky… is the sky clear enough to cast a shadow or is it cloudy? The varmint is only a proxy for any shadow-caster. The question to us is, does the <whatever> cast a shadow on this midwinter’s day? The answer, according to our divining, is either ‘yes’ or ‘no’. Binary. Simple as that.
The prediction: Depending on the presence of shadows, we will either have a normal winter that extends the full six weeks to the end of March, or we will have an early spring.
Putting it all back together again: Imagine yourself out standing in your field. It is midwinter (-ish), the air is crisp and the clear sky is that special steel blue of winter with a cold sun hanging low toward the south and your vivid shadow dances on the bright snow. Winter has settled in and doesn’t seem to be in such a hurry to leave… go wax up the skis.
However, if no shadows appear it is because it is either night or dark clouds are blocking the sun. Clouds foreshadow storms, storms indicate impending change in the weather. If winter weather changes, it changes into spring. If there are storms in the sky, spring is on its way… go get the plow ready.
No critters were harmed writing this article.. and now I can spell Punxsutawney!
