Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 84.djvu/153

Rh Unlike the bear, the woodchuck is exclusively vegetarian in diet. A favorite food is red clover, but it also eats apples, berries, grass, growing grain, nuts, bark and tender twigs of trees and shrubs; and it seems to have a peculiar fondness for the green leaves and twigs of the sassafras. During the spring and early summer these animals wander about, when their family duties permit, and consume great quantities of food. By September they have become very fat, and instead of going out two or three times a day to feed, they probably do not go out more than once, and when the days become chill, not that often. The time at which they begin to hibernate doubtless varies with the locality and the individual animal. In southern Indiana, where most of my own observations have been made, they retire about the end of October, or when the acorns and beech nuts are falling and the forest's red and gold is giving way to brown.

As to the condition of the animal during its long period of torpor, I know nothing. It is said to retire to a lateral chamber in its burrow, where it shuts out the cold air by filling the entrance with earth. There it remains for about five months, eating nothing, probably very cold and with its circulation and respiration reduced to a minimum.

In many parts of the country there exists a curious superstition (I know no better name for it) that "the ground hog" comes out from his winter's sleep on February second, and if the sun shines forth so that he can see his shadow he will retire to his hole and stay there six weeks longer, and there will be six weeks more of winter weather. There is doubtless some connection between this date and Candlemas day, for there is a stanza of an old poem, the origin of which I do not know, that begins:

 If Candlemas be fair and bright Then winter will take another flight.

How the "ground hog" came to be connected with Candlemas remains a mystery. The late Professor Otis T. Mason, of the Smithsonian Institution, an authority on American folk lore, told me a few years ago that he had no idea where the "ground-hog day" fable originated, and he also stated that it is, or was, unknown south of Mason and Dixon's line.

There has been a dispute in some quarters as to whether "groundhog day" is really the second day of February or the third. To settle the matter, a bill was introduced into the legislature of a certain state a quarter of a century ago to appropriate two thousand dollars to defray the expenses of a scientific commission that should investigate the matter and settle the dispute for all time. The bill did not become a law. Perhaps it is on this account that the perverse "ground hog" refuses to come out on either of these dates. The exact time of