Nova Scotia's beloved celerity groundhog, Shubenacadie Sam, is predicting a long winter ahead.
The large rodent poked her nose out from the pint-sized barn door of her enclosure at a wildlife park north of Halifax Sunday morning and stepped out into the -18 degrees cold.
She spent a few moments sniffing the air and looking around at the crowd that gathered on this sunny and frigid morning to watch her prediction, before turning around and heading back inside her enclosure.
"Not surprisingly, it seems Sam wants to get back inside," Andrew Boyne, the director of the wildlife division at the Department of Natural Resources, told the crowd.