A handler holds aloft Phil the groundhog during festivities in Punxsutawney, PA. (Photo: SchultzLabs/flickr)

What does any of this have to do with wildlife? Well, besides the obvious Punxsutawney Phil reference (he’s the “official” groundhog) it’s a pretty good analogy for what’s going on with the Keystone XL pipeline because, once again, Congress is trying to short-circuit environmental reviews and build the [dang] thing. This time, our old buddies Senator David Vitter (R-Louisiana) and Rep. Lee Terry (R-Nebraska) are introducing yet another pair of bills in Congress that would mandate construction of the 2,000 mile tar sands pipeline, skipping over President Obama and giving a big gift to the oil industry.

If at first you don’t succeed…

These bills mark at least the sixth (and seventh) attempts by Congress to cram Keystone XL down our throats, joining legislation pushed by:

• Sen. John Hoeven (R-ND) – January 2012
• Rep. Ted Poe (R-TX) – January 2012
• Rep. Denny Rehberg (R-MT) – December 2011
• Senators Richard Lugar (R-IN), Hoeven and Vitter (again)- November 2011
• Rep. Terry (again)- May 2011

All of these bills started from the same basic premise: “We’ve studied Keystone enough! Let’s put it in the ground!” This is a truly terrible premise to start from, considering the inadequacy of the studies that have been performed to date — we don’t even have comprehensive information on how much the project would raise global climate emissions, which is like rating Bill Murray’s career based solely on the awful fever dream that was the “Garfield” movie. (And speaking of career ratings, my favorite sentence of the year has to be this gem from Public Policy Polling, which found that “Congress is now less popular than root canals, NFL replacement referees, head lice, the rock band Nickelback, colonoscopies, carnies, traffic jams, cockroaches, Donald Trump, France, Genghis Khan, used-car salesmen and Brussel sprouts.)

Tar sands industrial complex in Alberta, Canada (Photo: Kris Krug)

Now, nobody is shocked that Sen. Vitter and Rep. Terry are pushing pro-Big Oil policies; it’s sort of what they’re known for. But that doesn’t make it any less frustrating, because Congress keeps resurrecting the issue despite Americans’ desire to move toward a clean energy economy — in fact, a recent voter poll from the Yale Project on Climate Change Communication shows overwhelming support across the political spectrum for renewables like wind and solar, as well as the belief that the government needs to act to combat the climate crisis.

President Obama understands what’s at stake, if you take his inaugural address at face value:

We, the people, still believe that our obligations as Americans are not just to ourselves, but to all posterity. We will respond to the threat of climate change, knowing that the failure to do so would betray our children and future generations.

It would be hard to put it any stronger, and a lot of people have been asking what that means for his decision on Keystone, which will go a long way toward shaping Obama’s climate legacy. This decision is way beyond mere symbolism: the oil industry is desperate for pipelines to export tar sands to new markets, so Keystone really is a huge factor in how fast and how large Canadian mining operations will grow.

Tens of thousands expected at massive climate rally

If Keystone XL gets built, we won’t need Punxsutawney Phil to predict the weather for us in years to come: the project would lock us into a bleak future of escalating oil consumption, degraded habitat, and a climate that is hotter and less hospitable for people and wildlife around the globe. We need Obama to stand up to Big Oil and their friends in Congress, by saying NO to the Keystone pipeline. JOIN US on February 17th to protect wildlife from climate change, when tens of thousands of Americans will rally at the White House in Washington, DC to protest tar sands and demand action on climate. RSVP HERE!

You can help! Tell President Obama to reject Keystone XL and dirty tar sands oil.

A woodchuck, or groundhog, during the warm months of grassy abundance.

The groundhog, also known as the woodchuck or the mouse bear (because it looks like a miniature bear when sitting upright), first won its reputation as a weather prognosticator in 1886, when the editor of western Pennsylvania’s Punxsutawney Spirit newspaper, one Clymer Freas, published a report that local groundhogs had not seen their shadows that day, signaling an early spring.

This story begat Punxsutawney Phil, the legendary woodchuck weathercreature, which begat Ground Hog Day and the familiar idea that Phil (and his namesake successors down through the years) can predict the perpetuation of winter.

It is likely that the story of Phil is based on European beliefs that badgers and hedgehogs can provide signals about the future; lacking those species in his area, old Clymer substituted the local animal that most resembles a badger or a hedgehog.

But the groundhog is much more than a weather rodent. It’s also a real animal with a real life.

Here are 10 things you may not know about this roly-poly rodent:

1. Groundhogs are among the few animals that are true hibernators, fattening up in the warm seasons and snoozing for most of three months during the chill times.
2. While hibernating, a woodchuck’s body temperature can drop from about 99 degrees to as low as 37 (Humans go into mild hypothermia when their body temperature drops a mere 3 degrees, lose consciousness at 82 degrees and face death below 70 degrees).
3. The  heart rate of a hibernating woodchuck slows from about 80 beats per minute to 5.
4. Breathing slows from around 16 breaths per minute to as few as 2.
5. During hibernation—150 days without eating—a woodchuck will lose no more than a fourth of its body weight thanks to all the energy saved by the lower metabolism.
6. During warm seasons, a groundhog may pack in more than a pound of vegetation at one sitting, which is much like a 150-pound man scarfing down a 15-pound steak.
7. To accommodate its bodacious appetite, woodchucks grow upper and lower incisors that can withstand wear and tear because they grow about a sixteenth of an inch each week.
8. If properly aligned, woodchuck upper and lower incisors grind away at each other with every bite, keeping suitably short; when not in good order, they may miss one another and just keep growing until they look like the tusks on a wild boar; if too long, a woodchuck’s upper incisors can impale the lower jaw, with fatal results.
9. Woodchuck burrows, which the animals dig as much as 6 feet deep, can meander underground for 20 feet or more, usually with two entrances but in some cases with nearly a dozen.
10. Burrows provide groundhogs with their chief means of evading enemies, because the rotund little guys (just before hibernation, a hefty woodchuck may tip the scales at 14 pounds) are too slow to escape most predators in a dead heat: the rodents have a top speed of only 8 mph, while a hungry fox may hit 25 mph.

Bonus Fact: Although groundhogs may not be the best weather predictors, they do in fact emerge from dens in early February. This is the practice of males as they rouse themselves to wander around their 2- to 3-acre territories in search of burrows belonging to females, which the males will enter and where they may spend the night. Research suggests that no mating takes place at this time; the visits probably just let the animals get to know one another so that they can get right down to the business of breeding when they emerge for good in March. Outside of the mating season, woodchucks are solitary, except for females with young, which usually are born in early April.