Field Notes—

Winter Dreams And The Woolly Bear

By Curtiss Clark

Moving wood for the winter from the outside stack to the shelter of the back porch is always a pleasant chore. It’s October, and the world burns with color. The air is cool, and Kate and I shed flannel as we warm to the work. Despite the splinters, pinched fingers and, later on, sore muscles, we are always deeply satisfied when the work is done.

We have an oil furnace and, in the colder corners of the house, electric baseboard heat, and we could just skip all the heavy lifting by paying a premium to run these utilities overtime in the coming months. But for us, burning wood in the fireplaces and woodstove is not just a matter of BTUs. The various rituals associated with keeping the home fires burning provide footholds that help us find our way through the darkness of winter. Stacking wood in a dry place, splitting kindling, cleaning ashes beneath the grates, fiddling with dampers and pokers, and keeping the fire not too hot and not too cool is a far more hopeful enterprise than sitting by a fitful radiator peering out the window into the dark. Even in a blizzard, we know the smell of wood smoke can lead us home.

Keeping one’s footing as the earth whirls around the dark side of the year allows us to stand with other living things for whom winter preparations are a far more urgent imperative. This is the season when Nature’s hibernators, migrators, and clever operators are executing ancient strategies for living to see another spring.

And so it happened, as it does every October during the wood stacking ritual, that a sheet of bark separated from a quarter-split piece of oak, and out tumbled a woolly bear caterpillar. Curled in contempt for my sudden interruption of its own winter preparations, the caterpillar rolled clear of the commotion like an old tire and slowed to a spiral stop to consider its next move. Its next move, of course, was to the palm of my hand for an inspection of its reddish-brown middle band to see just how severe a winter we both would face.

Folklore holds that the wider the brown band of bristles between the two black ends of the woolly bear caterpillar, the milder the winter will be. The middle band on my friend from the woodpile accounted for five of its 13 segments — more than a third of its entire length, which portends a relatively mild winter.

I doubt whether the woolly bear ever consults the weather forecast it carries around on its own back. Worrying about the comparative characteristics of weather two or three months from now isn’t a bug thing. It’s a purely human obsession. Bugs just do what they do — lie low, lay eggs, whatever — without regard to the number of likely snowstorms in any given winter. With woolly bears, it’s pretty much the same thing every October: find a loose piece of bark and get behind it. 

There have been sporadic attempts over the years to demonstrate that the color of the woolly bear’s bristles do have some correlation to winter weather. One such “study” in the 40s and 50s, covered by The New York Herald Tribune, helped secure this notion in the popular mind. It was undertaken by an entomologist with the American Museum of Natural History, Dr C.H. Curran, who with the help of a band of willing friends established The Original Society of the Friends of the Woolly Bear. The members of the society would repair each fall to the Bear Mountain Inn in New York State for glorious walks in the woods by day and fine dining by night. To justify their self-indulgence, they would count the brown segments on the woolly bear caterpillars they came across them and declare whether the winter would be mild or severe after comparing notes. They were right 70 to 80 percent of the time.

My woolly bear from the woodpile is likely to be right on the money this year. Last week, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration announced that El Niño conditions in the tropical Pacific will result in a winter that is milder and wetter than normal.

In truth, the relative size of the band around the middle of woolly bears is related to its maturity. As it prepares to overwinter, the caterpillar begins to molt with the brown middle part overspreading the black ends. The older the caterpillar, the wider the brown band, so what the woolly bear is really telling us is how early a start it got last spring. In other words, how mild it was last winter.

Despite its ambivalence about the weather, the woolly bear, like Kate and me, is inclined to the future in a hopeful enterprise. We are seeking footholds on the path through winter in our concurrent rituals of stacking wood and finding a snug hiding place.

Kate and I are dreaming of snowy nights reading by the fire, El Niño willing.

The woolly bear’s larval dream is more daring: metamorphosis… taking to the sky on a May breeze and the creamy yellow-gold wings of the Isabella tiger moth it will become.