Bill de Blasio speaks out about dropping Staten Island groundhog

He’s coming out of the shadows.

Former New York City Mayor Bill de Blasio on Friday made rare comments addressing the tragic day he dropped Staten Island’s beloved groundhog on its head.

“Any event at 7 in the morning featuring an agitated live animal doesn’t end well,” he told Semafor journalist Kadia Goba on Groundhogs Day, exactly one decade since the Post watched him lose his grip and drop the rodent, ultimately leading to its untimely death.

He has previously described how his motor skills were “not at their best” when he arrived at the Staten Island Zoo to celebrate Groundhog Day on Feb. 2, 2014, and zoo staffers handed him Staten Island Chuck.

“I put on these gloves, and they’re like, ‘Here’s a groundhog,’ I’m like, ‘What the f–k?,” De Blasio said in an interview with New York Magazine first addressing the scandal last year.

“I’m like, ‘Don’t you have a little more coaching to go with this or whatever?’ It was idiocy. Why would you want an elected official to hold a groundhog?” he scoffed, adding that he “100% regrets” holding the animal, who squirmed out of the 6’5” mayor’s hands and plummeted to the ground.

Several months later, in September, The Post broke the news that Staten Island Chuck had died – and the zoo tried to cover it up.

The scandal then deepened when The Post revealed that Staten Island Chuck was actually a female stand-in, named Charlotte.

The real Chuck had secretly been swapped out after he famously nibbled on then-Mayor Michael Bloomberg’s leather-gloved hand at the 2009 Groundhog Day event, sources said.

The Staten Island Zoo kept the decoy operation under wraps to preserve the sacredness of the “groundhog brand,” the sources said.

Even Hizzoner himself swore he didn’t know.

“I found out as all of you found out – I had no idea previously,” de Blasio insisted at the time.

In the aftermath of the scandal, the Staten Island Zoo announced in January 2015 that it had revised its Groundhog Day policy so that no one – mayor or otherwise – could handle the animals.

The following month, de Blasio observed Groundhog Day from behind plexiglass.

Hizzoner then skipped Groundhog Day at the zoo in 2016 because he was campaigning in Iowa for Hillary Clinton’s presidential bid, the Staten Island Advocate reported.

No mayor has attended the annual event ever since.

Fortunately, Friday’s celebration went off without a hitch as children chanted “Early Spring, Early Spring” before Chuck failed to see his shadow — meaning an early spring is on its way.