Musings From The Farm Comfortable living in your own skin

I grew up hearing folks tell me about forecasting the winter weather by looking at the Woolly Bear Caterpillar. If you know what a Woolly Bear caterpillar looks like you can thank Dr. Howard Curran, his study of them made them famous. The Woolly Bear Caterpillar is really the larva of the Tiger moth. They are a common sight in the fall looking for places where they can curl up and hide for the winter. It is about one and a half inches long with black and brown bristly stripes.
I was always getting conflicting theories on what the colored stripes meant for the coming winter weather. We have seen more of these caterpillars than usual this fall, so I had to look up what they were trying to tell me.

Legend has it that Dr. Howard Curran, a curator at the American Museum of Natural History in NYC decided that he was going to study the woolly caterpillar and see if the folklore was true. It may have been just a fun excuse to get out of NYC and be leaf peepers (city folks who travel to the mountains to see the fall foliage) traveling to Bear Mountain with his wife and friends. They actually called themselves The Original Society of the Friends of the Woolly Bear. Anyway he did actually conduct a study for several years and it turned out the tiny caterpillar did predict with some accuracy whether the winter would be severe or mild. Although he did think his study was too small to say for sure. He said if the brown middle strip was over one third larger than the black stripes at the ends then it would be a mild winter. If the black stripes were wider it would be a severe winter. Most scientists don’t think his theory holds true. But entomologist Mike Peters of the University of Massachusetts explains, “There’s evidence that the number of brown hairs has to do with the age of the caterpillar—in other words, how late it got going in the spring. It does say something about a heavy winter or an early spring. The only thing is . . . it’s telling you about the previous year.”

So you could say that the woolly bear caterpillar does tell you about the winter, but only if you want to know how bad last year’s winter was.  But still, I think the caterpillars guess is that far off than the weatherman’s forecast.

Our animals are unhappy horses.  Our pony and horse are too fat.  We have too much grass and too few animals.  For most farmers, the problem is the other way around.  They have unhappy horses because they do not get to eat all the grass they want.  They stay in small paddocks with little to eat in the way of natural forage.  They need to feed hay and grain year round.  Not so with us. Our guys only eat grass, and most of the time until the grass dies or is covered in too much snow.  Only then do we start feeding them hay.  It’s a very healthy diet for them, but it’s just too much of a good thing.

By this time of year, the grass has stopped growing and they are not gaining weight.  This fall, we are having an unusually mild fall and the grass is growing like its spring.  There are a lot of weeds mixed in with the grass, but the grass is growing surprisingly fast.  So far this fall we have mowed twice, thinking it would be the last time this year we would need to cut it.  Unfortunately every time I look out at the pasture it is tall, tick, green and growing like spring. All the while, I have been watching my horses getting fatter and fatter.  I finally got so concerned for their health that I made them come in at night and lock them out of the pasture.  You see, just like people, horses can get sick from being overweight.  They can get something like diabetes (but for horses) and there is another strange illness called founder.  It is like getting a fever in your fingernails.  I told you it was strange! It is also called laminitis, because it is an inflammation of the laminae in the hoof.  Basically the hoof gets hot and soft, and it can get wrinkles in it.  It is very painful for the horse and can cause permanent lameness and even death.

So now when I look out at them in the morning I see unhappy horses. I feel bad, but the alternative is killing them with kindness. So they are just going to have to be unhappy for now.