Nova Scotia's beloved celerity groundhog, Shubenacadie Sam, is predicting a long winter ahead.
The large rodent poked her nose out from the pint-sized barn door of her enclosure at a wildlife park north of Halifax Sunday morning and stepped out into the -18 degrees cold.
She spent a few moments sniffing the air and looking around at the crowd that gathered on this sunny and frigid morning to watch her prediction, before turning around and heading back inside her enclosure.
"Not surprisingly, it seems Sam wants to get back inside," Andrew Boyne, the director of the wildlife division at the Department of Natural Resources, told the crowd.
Boyne said Sam saw her shadow, which folklore says predicts six more weeks of cold, wintry weather.
"More winter!" He exclaimed.
No shadow is said to foretell the early arrival of spring-like temperatures.
Living on the East Coast, Shubenacadie Sam is typically the first groundhog in North America to issue a long-term forecast.
She will be followed by Ontario’s Wiarton Willie and Quebec’s Fred la Marmotte.
In western Pennsylvania, Punxsutawney Phil saw his shadow and is predicting six more weeks of wintry weather, his top-hatted handlers announced Sunday.
A massive crowd was on hand to hear the woodchuck’s weather forecast, an annual ritual that has boomed in public interest since Bill Murray’s 1993 movie, “Groundhog Day.”
In medieval Europe, farmers believed that if hedgehogs emerged from their burrows to catch insects it was a sure sign of an early spring.
– With files from The Associated Press.
This report by The Canadian Press was first published Feb. 2, 2025.
The Canadian Press
