Thickwood Badger Day simply doesn’t have the ring of Groundhog Day. Perhaps it’s as a result of we’ve had Groundhog Day for greater than 100 years, together with enormous media protection of Punxsutawney Phil for a number of many years. Perhaps it’s as a result of virtually none of us at present know what the heck a thickwood badger is.
It’s one other identify for the groundhog, certainly one of many names for the massive rodent. Woodchuck is the second commonest identify, originating as an interpretation by European colonists of the Algonquian phrase for the animal, “wuchak,” and giving rise to this little ditty:urn:uuid:a5f02612-cdd6-dc21-2fab-dc21cdd6a5f0
How a lot wooden would a woodchuck chuck
if a woodchuck might chuck wooden?
A woodchuck would chuck all of the wooden he might
if a woodchuck might chuck wooden!
That tongue tornado originated within the chorus of the “Woodchuck Music,” which was written by Robert Hobart Davis and Theodore Morse and debuted in 1903 within the musical comedy “The Runaways.” The music was later offered to shoppers as sheet music and recorded and offered on Edison wax cylinders, which have been the predecessor to flat phonograph information, by Ragtime Bob Roberts.
Groundhogs don’t really chuck a lot wooden, even once they’re going by the identify of woodchuck. They actually have little curiosity in wooden. They’re herbivores and eat a wide range of grasses, legumes, greens, grasses and fruits. Most popular meals embrace grasses, clover, alfalfa, soybeans, beans, peas, carrots, and apples and pears within the fall. They eat a couple of third of their weight day-after-day and may do a whole lot of injury in gardens, to residential landscapes and agricultural fields. Their consumption will increase from late summer season by way of fall in preparation for hibernation. Additionally they have been recognized to eat a small quantity of bugs, principally unintentionally as bugs on vegetation they eat.
Though they don’t seem to be eaters of timber and shrubs, they do typically present a brief curiosity in timber. They’re in a position climbers and can take to the timber to flee predators and to search out meals.
Along with groundhog, woodchuck, thickwood badger and wuchak, different names embrace the Pennsylvania Dutch grundsau, the scientific Marmota monax, chuck, wood-shock, groundpig, whistlepig, whistler, Canada marmot, weenusk and siffleux.
Groundhog Day, which falls on February 2 (Candlemas Day) yearly, creates one other false impression concerning the groundhog. Punxsutawney Phil and the opposite weather-forecasting groundhogs shall be inspired into artificially early emergence from their burrows on Wednesday.
Most groundhogs will stay in hibernation this week, however males will start to point out themselves later in February, once they start their annual searches for mates. Even with snow nonetheless on the bottom, they’ll journey – typically surprisingly lengthy distances – all through their vary to examine the dens of females to see if they’re nonetheless occupied and to find different males that is perhaps encroaching on their territory.
The males then return to their very own dens for just a few extra weeks of sleep, earlier than rising for the season in early March, when the females additionally emerge for mating.
Regardless of the stuttered emergence of the males in February and March, groundhogs are true hibernators. On and off from late fall to early spring they’ll enter torpor, with physique temperature lowered from 99 levels to about 38 levels, coronary heart fee lowered from 80 beats per minute to five and respiratory lowered from 16 breaths per minute to as little as 2. They intersperse these durations of torpor with just a few days of wakefulness within the burrow.