Wayne's World: Groundhogs aren't the only predicting critters

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Gray squirrels are related to groundhogs, although squirrels don't get as much attention every Feb. 2.TOM BUSHEY/Times Herald-Record

Move over, groundhogs. You're not the only critter with weather-predicting talent.

Advance warnings of all kinds come from most of nature's furry and feathered forecasters.

Such as the weather-prediction star that's a type of bristly caterpillar called the wooly bear whose launch at the Bear Mountain Zoo in 1948 has created a huge kids' following at the Hudson Highlands Nature Museum — and across the country.

Back in the '40s, the insect caught the attention of a wizard insect scientist at the Museum of Natural History who made it famous by counting the caterpillar's brown and black bands — and determined that thicker brown meant a mild winter.

Wooly bear predictions continue to be just fun, with a sort of coin-flip chance of the caterpillars being right, says Jack Focht, the retired director of the Trailside Museum and Bear Mountain Zoo.

"I've always said it was just a kind of tongue-in-cheek thing though he (C.H. Curran) did look into it."

In fact, Curran was a mega insect star, veteran of expeditions to places like the Congo to collect insects. Yet he gave the wooly bear maybe a 50-50 chance of being right.

Besides anything, wooly bears are real hits with the 7-to-8-year-old crowd, adds Pam Golben, director of the Hudson Highlands Nature Museum's Wildlife Education Center. "And parents have fun, too," she says.

But there's a keener edge to critters that makes them real top weather forecasters, says Bill Storer of New Windsor, a sportsman and nature lover.

"Animals have senses we don't know about, like magnetism, star orientation, and they have things we couldn't possibly understand. People think they're so smart, but animals have skill sets we can't even imagine."

For one, he means the migratory Monarch butterfly, "That can, with a brain smaller than a pinhead, find its way back to Mexico."

That's because animals don't mess around.

Item: Squirrels pay no attention to Groundhog Day — even though both are members of the squirrel family.

In fact, two gray squirrels on Thursday started their own Valentine's Day in Cornwall.

A fat gray male squirrel flung himself 20 feet to the base of a bird feeder to confront a nice, fat female gray squirrel.

She enticingly ran her claws through frosty rubble of discarded birdfeeder seeds on the ground. They lunged at each other. Then she leaped onto the roof of a house, ran across it, flung herself against a big oak and disappeared. He was in hot pursuit.

This is great fun to watch. And the old weather predictions are delightful to know, such as cows lying down in pastures before rain.

This comes down to us as an official listing in the U.S. Department of Agriculture's 1903 report called "Weather Folklore and Local Weather Signs."

The chief of the U.S. Weather Bureau directed this to me, a professor of meteorology wrote it and the government printing office printed it.

It sounds like they had a good time writing it. They dubbed animal weather smarts as "keenly prophetic instinct."

Or as Susan Brander says in Central Valley about her late budgie birds Max, Harriet and Bette: "When it was nice out, they were happier, just like people. They could feel it."

Call animal weather prediction folklore, if you must, but do go to the Cornwall nature museum's wildlife center and listen to the gray tree frogs sing just before it rains.

"They always do," Golben says.


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