Groundhog Day is just goofy superstition, although it does have a link to reality

DEAR JOAN: I grew up in Contra Costa County and as today is Groundhog Day, I thought it was a good time to ask what exactly a groundhog is.

Do we have any in the Bay Area? I’m pretty sure they can’t predict the weather, so how did that legend come to be?

J.C., Walnut Creek

DEAR J.: Groundhogs can’t predict the weather? Well, for Pete’s sake, don’t tell Punxsutawney Phil. He and his kind have been working that con for centuries.

The groundhog (Marmota monax) is a rodent and belongs to the family of large ground squirrels known as marmots. While we have lots of native ground squirrels, and some marmots high in the Sierra, we do not have groundhogs, which also are known as woodchucks or, my favorite, whistlepigs.

The groundhogs’ territory is primarily the Eastern United States, across Canada and into Alaska. While the groundhogs’ cousins live in the mountains, the woodchucks are in the lowlands, where their tunnels help maintain healthy soil in the woodlands and plains.

Groundhogs are considered extremely intelligent and form complex social networks without the assistance of Facebook, Instagram or Twitter. They comprehend social behaviors, form relationships with their offspring, communicate through body language and whistling, and are known to work together when it comes to burrowing.

Still, they are not well-loved in general. An 1883 report by the New Hampshire Legislative Woodchuck Committee left little doubt about the regard in which groundhogs were held.

“Contemporaneous with the ark, the woodchuck has not made any material progress in social science, and it is now too late to reform the wayward sinner,” the report read.

It went on to complain about the length of the groundhog’s life span (too long for the committee members) and the nuisances the animal created.

“It burrows beneath the soil and then chuckles to see a mowing machine, man and all, slump into one of these holes and disappear.”

It would seem that the groundhog only gets positive attention on Feb. 2, Groundhog Day. According to a superstition of the Pennsylvania Dutch, borrowing from an old German superstition involving a badger instead of a groundhog, if the woodchuck emerges on this day and sees his shadow, he will retreat back into his den and the area will have six more weeks of winter weather. Failure to see the shadow, an indication the skies are overcast, means an early spring.