I wrote this column on Groundhog Day but at noon I still hadn’t bothered to check what happened.
Eventually I saw that the groundhog growled and went back inside, and that made me laugh because if someone woke me up in the middle of my night, I might growl too.
You have to hand it to Clymer H. Freas, though. He was the editor of the Punxsutawney, Pa., newspaper when he declared in 1887 that their town’s groundhog was the official rodent meteorologist. He put the town on the map, so to speak, and Groundhog Day has become so famous that now there are many copycat prognosticators.
In Canada, Groundhog Day is called Jour de la Marmotte because groundhogs are members of the ground squirrel, or marmot, family. I don’t know if they actually pull one out of its den somewhere up there, but here in the states it now happens at lots of places other than in Pennsylvania.
In Atlanta, the groundhog is called General Beauregard Lee and in North Carolina they call theirs Sir Walter Wally of Raleigh. But the spectacle I’d like most to see is the guy in Tennessee who dresses up like a groundhog and rides around on a motorcycle.
(For the record, Punxsutawney Phil saw his shadow Thursday, forecasting six more weeks of winter).
It was cold with snow showers in Punxsutawney on Groundhog Day, but here in our part of the state it was warm for this time of the year. And although that makes getting around easy, it’s not necessarily good for outdoor plants. Many of our native trees, shrubs and perennial plants need cold and dormancy in their life cycle to stay healthy, and continued unseasonable warmth may affect them in unhealthy ways.
Dormancy means a cessation of growth, and in temperate woody plants in the north this occurs as the days shorten in the fall and cold sets in. But there are different stages of dormancy and you’d have to be a biologist to completely understand them. So suffice it to say that when it’s warm at a time when it’s supposed to be cold, it can cause bud break and kill parts of the plant when freezing temperatures return.
If Mother Nature’s confused, who can blame her?
Groundhog Day has its roots in centuries old midwinter celebrations not involving a furry brown rodent, and most people recognize that it’s folklore and that winter will indeed continue for another six weeks. But folklore never dies, and recently I was reminded of another folklore belief.
I saw something dark crawling across the sidewalk to the kitchen door that turned out to be an all-dark woolly bear caterpillar brought out of its winter hideaway much too soon. In the cold weather, woolly bears, which end up becoming Isabella tiger moths, stash themselves away under bark, in logs and in rock crevices. Then in the spring they come out, spin a cocoon, and later emerge as a moth. But this one will never do that because the next morning it lay dead on the sidewalk.
Arlene Koch is a freelance writer. Email her at sports@lehighvalleylive.com. Find lehighvalleylive on Facebook.
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