AdventuresInNature

AUTUMN WOOLY WORMS: A MODEST MARVEL

Of the all the attractive but simpleminded natural fauna you’re likely to see rambling around in the fall of the year, the wooly worm caterpillar is perhaps the most abundant and easily recognizable.

(Come to think of it, those are the same words we used to describe my weird brother Tosh in his salad days – attractive but simpleminded, and way too abundant.)

The wooly worms – sometimes called wooly bears or wooly boogers – are everywhere. Crossing roads and sidewalks. Inching up door facings. Inside the house.

Whatever the local name, we’re talking about a caterpillar that will, in spring, turn into the tiger moth. The caterpillars are black on both ends with a reddish-brown band around the middle.
And that brings up one of the most interesting aspects of the wooly worm.

For generations, checking out the breadth of the brown band on a wooly worm is supposed to predict whether the coming winter will be mild or a real rip-snorter.

A narrow band of brown means a moderate winter. A broad band means snow galore, so you’d better gather in an extra pile of seasoned oak and hickory for the stove and extra flour for the gravy.

And here’s another mystery. Why does a wooly worm cross the road? The highways and back roads are where we see most wooly worms in autumn, diligently and single-mindedly humping it across a very dangerous piece of real estate.

Cars squash them into juice. Others are rolled like fuzzy little tumbleweeds by the backwash of a car traveling half a hundred miles an hour.

The ones that aren’t squashed almost immediately right themselves and continue on their determined way – although the "way" may be the exact opposite from where they were headed.

Naturalist Edwin Way Teale, author of "Stalking the Wild Asparagus," once spent several days working with wooly worms. On remote highways, he’d find one headed east, then turn it west. No matter which he pointed the little fellow, it seemed to consider its journey in the opposite direction just as important as the one it had chosen originally.

I’ve spent about 10 minutes (which is enough) doing the same thing -- flipping wooly worms -- and can report that Teale (who was probably getting paid for such foolishness) was absolutely right.

The big secret, of course, is that the colorful caterpillar is searching out a snug place to sleep away the winter. Whether its eventual bed is in leaves, bark and forest litter above or below the road doesn’t count for much.

But a word of warning. If my grandmother was right, and broader bands do foretell a hard winter, we might be in for a lot of snow and snuggling weather.

Maybe it was just the angle from which I looked at them – down on hands and knees in the middle of a remote country road, hind end pointed skyward, face against the pavement – but it seemed to me that the brown middle bands are just a tad broader than normal.

A word to the wise is, in most cases, sufficient.

END