First off, the whole thing’s a farce.
Chuckles XI, Connecticut’s most press-worthy groundhog, resides indoors at the Manchester Lutz Children’s Museum for 364 days a year. One day a year, she is god.
The marmot came to Lutz from a wildlife rehabilitation center, Executive Director Clare Mazur explained at the museum’s yearly event. (Mazur is drinking Coca-Cola at 7 a.m., wearing knee-high, high-heeled boots as she fields questions from NBC about woodchucks.)
“It’s kind of like how magic works,” Mazur said. “A groundhog knows when to come out, scientifically, because it’s too cold.”
“Chuckles lives inside,” I pointed out.
“It was pretty cold in here last night,” she said. Mazur would know: She and the museum’s staff hosted a slumber party in the building the night before Chuckle’s big day, which the museum has held since 1968.
When day comes, Manchester Mayor Jay Moran speaks to Chuckles, and the marmot tells him, apparently, if she did or did not see her shadow.
“Chuckles and I got together early in the morning,” Moran said. “and I did—” He proceeded to make groundhog chucking noises with his lips. Readers, imagine someone puckering up for a kiss. “I said [to Chuckles], ‘So what do you think?’ And she looked at me like, ‘Mr. Mayor, look outside—it’s five degrees and we have two feet of snow: six more weeks of winter.’”
“When did you first learn to speak groundhog?” I asked.
“The day I took the oath of mayor,” Moran said. “You start talking groundhog. It’s amazing. And no one else in the state of Connecticut can do it.”
In 2019, the Connecticut General Assembly passed an official citation recognizing Chuckles in the prognosticators’ contributions to “forecasting the length of the winter season.”
Prognostication, the word used to describe the weather-predictive abilities of groundhogs (and now, apparently, Scramble the Eastford Duck, and Beardsley Bart, the Beardsley Zoo’s Prairie Dog), is one of those words like defenestration—you almost never use it, but boy aren’t you glad it exists?
Chuckles XI is the mayor’s fourth groundhog partner in his 11 years on the job. The Lutz Museum actually houses two groundhogs: the State has christened both of them official prognosticators, though Chuckles X now lives in retirement, according to one museum attendant.
Our national prognosticator Punxsutawney Phil is immortal, a friend explained to me over lunch. Connecticut, on the other hand, contends with our marmots’ transience.
Some Wesleyan attendees expressed concern over the groundhogs’ seemingly small indoor enclosure.
“I think some of the groundhogs living under Out House have a better life,” Rachel Walker ’27 said, referring to the Outing Club residence. “They are well fed down there, eating all our compost.”
The Save The Animals Rescue Foundation, based in Long Island, N.Y., told The Argus that groundhogs brought into rehabilitation centers have often been injured so severely that they would not survive a return to the wild.
“They can either stay as educational animals or be euthanized,” rehabilitator Lori Ketcham explained.
Yikes!
The Long Island center has two male groundhogs who “get pushy with each other,” Ketcham said. Lutz’s two female groundhogs seemingly live together in harmony in an enjoined enclosure.
Moreover, woodchucks really do chuck wood.
“If you leave them alone in the building, they will eat the doors,” Ketcham said.
Wesleyan attendees had other fears.
“It’s a full moon today, and that begs the question: If Groundhog Day falls on a full moon, is there a concern that the groundhog will not only come out and predict the weather, but come out evil and have the taste for man and flesh?” Austin Halsey ’26 said.
“Really the question is not, ‘How much wood would a woodchuck chuck,’” Simon Moss ’26 said. “But, ‘Would the woodchuck even chuck wood, if flesh is a better option?’”
Moss and Halsey wore beautiful matching maroon suits to the event. They explained to Mayor Moran that they had just come from “a Groundhog Day–themed wedding, where [the couple] met that day and kept reliving it until they got married.”
“I’ve been married 36 years,” Moran said. “I’m going to say ‘no comment,’ which is a comment.” Mayor Moran is full of this sort of canned banter. In a three-minute interview, he made two jokes about his wife.
“When I get mad at my wife, I speak Chuckles,” Moran said.
“Does she respond?” I asked.
“She has no idea what I said,” Moran said. “Even when I speak in English.”
Groundhog Day, of course, has become synonymous with the Bill Murray film of endless repetition: a man trapped in complete, total freedom without consequence or progress. The end of college can feel a bit like that. The future is near and big and blank and wide.
“Whatever it is you do,” a mentor recently told me, “you should do it far and deep. Pretend it’s the real thing, even though you know it might not be.”
Pretend, maybe, that groundhogs really can control the future. There is safety in that surety.
And sometimes, there’s nothing to do but go experience it, as Walker once wrote to me. To gather a group of friends who are so excited they can’t quite sleep at night, because maybe there is magic in the morning. This eleventh groundhog in a string of groundhogs that confide in mayors and wish away our snow, again, again, again.
This silly thing we do for joy.
Thomas Lyons can be reached at trlyons@wesleyan.edu.
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