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Animal Behavior
It’s Groundhog Day. Again…
Pondering the holiday that celebrates animal behavior.
Posted January 28, 2021
For almost a year, I, like many of us, have lived like Bill Murray in the film Groundhog Day, experiencing a uniformity of action that is rare in our formally hectic 21st-century lives. I have been fortunate, however, to have had some respites. After a difficult time during the hard shutdown in Los Angeles that shuttered beaches and hiking trails, which gave me nature deficit disorder and prevented me from going to Colorado to continue our 59-year behavioral and ecological study of yellow-bellied marmots, I was permitted in late May to take a skeleton crew and resume our field study. Groundhogs are one of the 15 species of marmots—large, often alpine dwelling ground squirrels. I’m a marmot enthusiast and have studied the behavior and ecology of groundhogs and seven other of the 15 species that are scattered across the northern hemisphere.
What we celebrate now as Groundhog Day began as a Pagan northern European mid-winter festival, later modified by Christians and celebrated as Candlemas Day, and when, in the 19th century Germans settled in Western Pennsylvania, became known as Groundhog Day.
What’s so special about groundhogs? They hibernate. Relying only on fat stored during the summer, they spend months in what’s known as a deep torpor, rising intermittently to urinate, roll over and go back into another energy-saving bout of torpor where they breathe infrequently and suppress their metabolism and body temperature in an amazing feat of energy conservation that permits them to live in harsh, highly seasonal environments. But, all good things must come to an end and at some point, they arise and look around for mates. And it was this that was the key to the holiday. In Europe, people tracked hedgehogs—another hibernator—as a predictor of spring. But there are no hedgehogs in North America; groundhogs provided a good substitute.
Lore has it that if the groundhog saw its shadow, spring would be delayed. The idea was that in the winter, sunny days are associated with high pressure systems meaning that the weather was less likely to change for the better. The last time I looked, Punxsutawney Phil, the most famous of all prognosticating groundhogs, was right about 50% of the time.
Harold Ramis’ 1993 film Groundhog Day brought new notoriety to groundhogs and to Punxsutawney, Pennsylvania, which morphed from hosting a cultural/natural history curiosity to a full-blown party that attracted thousands of revelers who partied all night and eagerly cheered (or booed) Punxsutawney Phil’s prognostications (which, sadly, have not improved).
Yet the film has also been interpreted by many different religious scholars as illustrating fundamental virtues. For instance, Buddhists may see their idea of ‘samsara,’ which is a seemingly endless cycle of rebirth that humans must go through to improve. It took Murray’s character helping a cold, homeless person to break his cycle of despair.
In the before-COVID times, I worked closely with many students and trainees at UCLA, taught undergraduate and graduate classes, shuttled between meetings on campus, and traveled extensively for invited lectures, conferences, teaching, and field research. Now, my days are substantially more predictable.
When I’ve been so fortunate to be in the field, we rise early, and spend our mornings trapping and watching marmots interact. If we’ve been successful with our trapping, there are samples to process in the lab and paperwork that must be filled out. Weather permitting, we repeat this cycle in the afternoon. I go to bed early so that I can get up early and do it all again. Things become less predictable when pups emerge from their natal burrows in July; we must trap and mark them before they are killed by the foxes, coyotes, and hawks that rely on them to feed their offspring. Thus, we spend a lot of July in the field focusing on trapping the pups. This year, while endlessly waiting for pups to walk into traps, I spent much of my time thinking and pondering the predicament we’ve found ourselves in.
Back in LA, to maintain my sanity, I’ve surfed most mornings since I got back from the field—the beaches and trails opened up again! I’ve found a suboptimal stretch of the beach to surf at that is not that crowded and thus, I assume, relatively safe. Up early. Take the dog out. Make and drink a double-shot of espresso. Head to the beach. Paddle out beyond the break and wait. See surfable wave, paddle, paddle, paddle, pop up. Fall, cut back, or make the section! Paddle back out and wait patiently for the next wave. Repeat for about an hour or so. Head home. Wash off. Play with the dog and hose while rinsing my surf wear. Take warm shower. Have another double-shot of espresso. Sit down and start working.
Weekdays and weekends blend into one another. Since I’m fortunate to be able to work from home, I work all the time. Before COVID, I tried to maximize my time at work and minimize time working at home. Now I must force myself to take a short break around lunch when I take the dog out and have a final double-shot of espresso. And, I must force myself to stop most nights. Most evenings are spent cooking and eating with my family, reading, and/or watching a movie. I go to bed early. I am privileged to be in a relatively safe and secure position yet I worry daily about those who are not.
How will our endless cycle end? Societally, we’re not doing a very good job of helping the cold and homeless. Indeed, we seem to be poised to increase homelessness. A friend shared with me the despair she sees at the Southern California food bank where she volunteers. I hear second-hand stories of rationing of oxygen in premier Los Angeles hospitals and people dying in the hallways, unable to get a bed. I see people brazenly refusing to wear masks. I hear stories of young people chiding older people for being fearful. I fail to see the communitarian spirit that has, at crucial times, pulled our country of rugged individualists together. To each his own is not really a motto for the country I believe in. I am sad and scared for our collective future. And this was before January 6th!
Of course, our endless cycle will end. Largely because of the science that has continually warned us (sadly on deaf ears) about the causes and catastrophic risks of such pandemics, as well as the truly amazing science that created a stream of novel vaccines in an astonishingly short time. We are likely to be living with COVID for the rest of our days and while there will not be post-COVID times, there will be post-pandemic times. What, however, will we have learned from the sacrifices and suffering during these COVID times that will permit us to break out of our endless cycle of habitat destruction and extinction, inequality-generating capitalism, and despair for so many of us? Something to ponder on this Groundhog Day.
