Predicting the Coming Winter Weather
Filed Under: Do It Yourself on October 2, 2009
In the spring of 1775, Paul Revere rode his famous ride, reportedly yelling “The Redcoats are coming! The Redcoats are coming!” While no popular historical account is mentioned of the silversmith’s activities six or seven months prior, I personally suspect that he was riding through shouting “The goose bone is purple! The goose bone is purple!” Telling everyone that rough weather would come that winter.
With our rolling into October comes the tradition of weather prediction. For the next month or two, every Old Wive’s method of foretelling the coming winter’s impact and severity will be trotted out and treated quaintly on the daily news channel and in various main stream publications. No one, of course, is going to publicly say that any of these methods might work better than sophisticated scientific instruments or multiple PhDs from accredited universities.
Little do they know…
I’m not going to present any scientific proof that these old methods for winter weather prediction are accurate. I’m just going to show them to you. One thing you should know, though, is that these methods have been around a lot longer than Doppler radar and low-orbit satellites. Most of them, in fact, have been around longer than whatever university your TV weatherman graduated from has been. Plus, they’re pretty cool in their own way. No flashy lights or fancy maps, but there are some fun things you and your family can do to get out and see for yourself.
Goose Bones – This is the one I alluded to for the theoretical Paul Revere’s ride. At about that time, this prediction method was at the height of its popularity. Taking place during harvest festivals and fall feasting (what we would now call Thanksgiving), this method was traditionally carried out by the oldest woman in the family.
After killing, plucking, and roasting a fresh goose, the carcass would be carefully cleaned and the wishbone removed. This would be placed on a high shelf to dry and checked every day. Usually within a week, the bone will have become brittle. At that point, the old grandmother would analyze it and foretell the coming winter.
If it had turned a dark color like blue or purple, she would forecast a harsh winter ahead and the menfolk would start working on winter fortifications – heavier latches or extra boards for the storm shutters, thicker thatch or shingles on the roof tops, extra care about the chimney, more firewood on the stack, etc.
If the bone remained light-colored, then the still-traditional wishbone ceremony would take place with the oldest boy and oldest girl (or a newlywed couple) each taking a half of the bone and breaking it to make a wish. A mild winter was a joyous thing and would be celebrated.
Woolly Worm (Caterpillar) – This one is popular in the Carolinas and the town of Banner Elk, North Carolina has a yearly festival surrounding this prediction method. The stripes of the Woolly Caterpillar are said to give foreknowledge of the coming winter’s severity. Every year in mid-October, specimens of the caterpillar are analyzed and the average width of the stripes explains the coming winter.
This method is fairly old, though it wasn’t really quantified until the early 1950s when the Curator of Insects at the American Museum of Natural History, Dr. CH Curran, started making yearly visits to Bear Mountain State Park to look at Woolly Bear Caterpillars.
Collecting the little worms, he meant to test a wive’s tale that the number of reddish-brown segments and their widths would predict the severity of the coming winter. His friend, a reporter for the New York Herald Tribune, reported the findings and every year for about a decade after. The predictions became popular and soon, it caught on as a tradition.
The wive’s tale Dr. Curran was using was probably from the Mohawk and perhaps Algonquin tribes of North American Indians, but no one’s been able to find out for sure. The Woolly Bear is the larval form of the Tiger Moth.
The Pig’s Spleen – This method is popular in the midwestern breadbasket and Saskatchewan. When a pig is slaughtered, the spleen can be analyzed to predict the next six months of weather. This one I’m not fully familiar with in terms of how it works, but an explanation from the Farmer’s Almanac makes sense of it.
Basically, the spleen is segmented into six parts, each of which is a coming month and each of which has signs that tell what’s coming. It’s caught on as a soothsayer’s method because, apparently, it’s extremely accurate. Click here to read the whole explanation from the Almanac.
Fun Sayings – There are a lot of sayings that no doubt you may have heard as a child or even skipped rope to. I recall several from my mother and grandmother as well as some I learned in Boy Scouts and other places. These are harder to quantify, but some are observations that current meteorologists actually use in modern science, despite their old origins.
The higher the clouds, the finer the weather. This was a mantra my Scout Master used to repeat whenever we’d go out on a hike and camp. He was a geologist and spent a lot of time outdoors and swore by this.
Ring around the moon, it’ll rain real soon! My older sisters used to chant this while jump roping with their friends.
Red sky at night, sailor’s delight. Red sky in the morning, sailors take warning. My grandmother used to say this when watching the sunset or sunrise.
A clear moon means frost comes soon. This was our neighbor’s farmhand prediction when watching the weather in the late summer and early fall to figure the last date before the Killing Frost. I was reminded of this recently when our current neighbor said much the same thing when we were talking gardens a couple of weeks ago.
When clouds a-tower, expect a frequent shower. I actually heard the weather man on the television say this earlier this summer. He was referring to a photograph a viewer had sent in earlier that day and proceeded to explain how this works and why. When clouds build upwards rather than outwards (get tall rather than long), it indicates updrafts and internal dynamics that mean the water vapor is being pushed outward like a centrifuge. This usually results in rain directly underneath the cloud as it passes.
There are probably a lot of other chants and weather prediction methods out there, these are just the ones I’m aware of. Some are probably more accurate than others, but I’d be willing to bet that some of these older methods are just as accurate and useful as any fancy radar or satellite photo would be. They’re more fun, that’s for sure.
