Woody the Woodchuck by Howell Nature Center

The Howell Nature Center shares: Groundhog Day 2025 is a wrap! Woody has predicted EARLY SPRING! 🌷🪻☀️ Thank you to everyone who came out to help us celebrate with Michigan’s official woodchuck. This was Woody’s 27th prediction, and her accuracy rate is about 65%!

So keep your Punxsutawney Phil forecast of 6 more weeks of winter, I’m going with Michigan’s official groundhog! Last year the Howell Nature Center shared why the event is so meaningful to them, education:

Groundhogs are often villified because of their digging habits, and it is easy to forget about their neat adaptations and their role in the ecosystem. We love sharing information about them to increase understanding, and this event gives Woody the opportunity to serve as an ambassador for her species to help people live in harmony with woodchucks.

DID YOU KNOW…

🐾 Woodchucks dig burrows that can be 50 ft long and include several different chambers for different purposes like raising young, hibernating, and toileting? Other species will even move into abandoned chambers!

🐾 With all that digging, woodchucks help aerate soil and recycle nutrients to increase soil health.

🐾 Woodchucks help disperse seeds, which promotes plant growth and diversity.

🐾 Woodchucks sometimes eat insects, which helps eliminate garden pests like grubs.

🐾 Woodchucks are an important part of the ecosytem and provide food for predators.

🐾 Woodchucks, also known as “whistle pigs”. are one of our only true hibernators in MI.

🐾 Their body temperatures can drop to 40 F and their heart rates to 4 beats per minute during hibernation.

Our wildlife helpline is available to help solve conflict with groundhogs that are living in undesirable places. We have lots of tips and tricks to humanely evict them and encourage them to move to a different location. Trapping and relocating is never a good idea, since it often results in death of groundhogs that are not able to find resources in a new location or of babies that have been orphaned by the removal of their mother.

I hope that you are able to make a donation on their website. Here are some of the injured and orphaned chucks they have cared for in their rehabilitation clinic.