No more Groundhog Day in Charlotte: After Queen Charlotte died, what’s next?

This Thursday will mark the first Groundhog Day in years without a local shadow-spying weather predictor in Charlotte.

And it might be the first of many.

Charlotte has no plans to crown a new Queen Charlotte to take over the weather-predicting business on Groundhog Day, a Discovery Place Nature spokesperson said. The most recent Queen Charlotte died Aug. 16, 2022 at the age of 9.

“Discovery Place Nature was proud to have her serve as an ambassador of the her species and the Museum for eight years, and we do not have plans for anointing a new Queen Charlotte,” museum spokesperson Sarah Wheat said by email.

NC’s groundhog ranks dwindling

The News & Observer reports that North Carolina will have just one groundhog prognosticator this year: Snerd, a longtime Garner groundhog.

Former North Carolina Groundhog Day celebrities have included:

Sir Walter Wally, Raleigh’s groundhog who lived in the North Carolina Museum of Natural Sciences, has retired. The museum said that its wildlife sanctuary supplier closed during the pandemic, and no replacement can be found.

Pumpkin, who predicts from Chimney Rock State Park, is recovering from a veterinary visit and will take the year off, according to the News & Observer.

And, of course, Queen Charlotte.

Long live Queen Charlotte

Queen Charlotte had been retired since last Groundhog Day, when Wheat said that the groundhog was “living out her days in comfort and our animal caregivers are focused providing enrichment and her favorite treats. We are not thinking about a replacement right now.”

The groundhog, who shared the same name as her predecessor, made her first weather forecast in private in 2015 before a public debut in 2016, according to Charlotte Observer archives. There has been a Queen Charlotte since at least the mid-2000s, previous Observer stories said, and possibly since the mid-1990s, according to one noted groundhog website. Discovery Place Nature’s records before 2018 aren’t accurate, Wheat said, so it’s unclear how long Queen Charlotte has reigned.

But the most recent Queen Charlotte was so famous she even had a Twitter account. Her bio on that site read, “There’s only room for one groundhog in this city.”

And now, maybe room for none.

This story was originally published February 1, 2023 at 5:00 AM.

Jodie Valade

The Charlotte Observer

Jodie Valade is a former Planning and Enterprise Editor at The Charlotte Observer. She has also worked at WFAE as a digital editor, and freelanced for publications such as The Athletic, The Washington Post and The New York Times. She was a longtime, award-winning sports features and enterprise reporter at The Plain Dealer in Cleveland, Ohio. She also worked at The Dallas Morning News covering the Dallas Mavericks — where she became Mark Cuban’s lifelong email pen pal — and at The Kansas City Star. Support my work with a digital subscription