Groundhog Day 2024 results: Did NYC’s Staten Island Chuck see his shadow? (live update)

>>Punxsutawney Phil’s pick is in! Did he agree with Staten Island Chuck?<<

STATEN ISLAND, N.Y. — The ‘hog has spoken!

Staten Island Chuck called for an early spring Friday during the first public Groundhog Day ceremony at the Staten Island Zoo, West Brighton, since 2020.

As tradition goes, if the groundhog sees its shadow, there will be six more weeks of winter. If not, an early spring is on the way.

Guests of honor included Emmy-nominated meteorologist and CBS News weather forecaster Tony Sadiku, several Staten Island elected officials, community leaders, and students and teachers from P.S. 29, I.S. 27 and Susan E. Wagner High School.

While Chuck’s main competitor, Punxsutawney Phil, has been making predictions for decades longer, Chuck boasts a more incredible accuracy rate. In fact, according to William Frew, Zoo board of trustees president, Chuck’s accuracy rate lands at an impressive 80%. He added Chuck has issued 14 consecutive correct predictions.

However, students at PS 45 in West Brighton said he was wrong in 2017. Prior to that, he was last wrong in 2009 — the same year he took a bite out of then-Mayor Michael Bloomberg.

If you missed the ceremony, you can watch it our Facebook page.

HISTORY OF GROUNDHOG DAY

The Groundhog Day tradition can be traced to Candlemas, an early Christian holiday where candles were blessed and distributed. Those who celebrated Candlemas decided that clear skies on the holiday meant a longer winter.

The Germans eventually began to believe that if the sun made an appearance on Candlemas Day, a hedgehog would cast a shadow — predicting six more weeks of harsh winter weather. And it was the Germans who brought this belief to the United States.

When German immigrants arrived in Pennsylvania, they found a large number of groundhogs. And they tasked the groundhog, which resembles a European hedgehog, with the job of predicting the weather.

The holiday started with the Punxsutawney Groundhog Club, founded in Punxsutawney, Pennsylvania, in 1887. The editor of the Punxsutawney newspaper was a member of the club, and he claimed that Punxsutawney Phil was the only true weather-predicting groundhog.