Woolly Weatherman

One of my favorite memories of fall is playing on my cousins' porch when the woolly worms were out. They always fascinated me. For all intents and purposes, they're bugs, but they're bugs with fur. Pettable bugs. And I remember some years when my cousins' porch was literally littered with them. I'd sit on the porch and watch them crawl around, pick them up, and, of course, pet them. What kid doesn't like to pet things?

Now that I'm all grown up, I've learned that there's more to those little critters than just pretty colors and pettable fur. Did you know that they can predict the weather? The pattern of orange and black stripes on them supposedly gives a hint as to how severe the upcoming winter will be.

Living in The City, I don't see them all that often anymore. Every once in a while I'll catch a glimpse of one on a drive, but it's seldom. However, since April, I've been working in a more rural setting. This given me the benefit of seeing little critters I didn't get to see while I was working downtown: from hawks and buzzards to grasshoppers and wolf spiders. (I didn't say they were all pleasant critters!)

As I left work the other day, I saw the first woolly worm I've seen in several years, little legs rolling it across the pavement. After my initial reaction of, "ooh, neat!" I am sorry to say that my very next thought was, "I wonder what it thinks the weather is going to be like this winter!"

As a little bit of background information, I work for a power company and have become a little bit of a weather geek because it can have a pretty hefty impact on our business. Take, for example, the remnants of hurricane Ike that came through almost a year ago and knocked out power to my whole city for roughly ten days. Take, for a second example, the ridiculously severe ice storm that hit in January and knocked power out for almost the entire central and western part of the state for almost two weeks. Yeah. It wasn't pretty.

So I call up my husband, who is a repository for all sorts of random knowledge about the weather and anything you can find in a Farmer's Almanac, and ask him how the woolly worm forecasts the winter. He responds that the black parts predict bad weather and the orange parts predict mild weather.

Ahhhh. Um. Really?

Then I guess it's a bad thing that this little guy looked like a fuzzy black hole crawling its way across the pavement?

It seems our woolly weather watcher is predicting a wicked winter.

If you live in the Bluegrass, consider yourself warned.