Old Farmer’s
Almanac,
Wooly Worms
& Ted
By Catherine Shaw Bowker
The holidays are nearly over for this year
and, if it is not already, winter will be upon
us in full. Like the animals, we now settle in
and wait for Mother Nature to deliver her
gift. While some like a good surprise and are
willing to wait, most of us want to tear at the
paper of that gift for an inkling of what we are
in for this winter. We may have consulted the
Old Farmer’s Almanac, observed nature before
she was covered in snow, or were fortunate
enough to hear Ted Shapiro’s winter weather
prediction. All of these methods have their
merits and their flaws. After all, does anyone
really know what nature has planned for us?
The Old Farmer’s Almanac uses a secret
formula to predict the season’s weather. In
fact, it is so secret that the formula is locked
in a black box in the magazine’s headquarters
in Dublin, New Hampshire. According to
this year’s Almanac, “a large area of belownormal temperatures will predominate…
north and east through New England…
the stage will be set for the Midwest, Great
Lakes, and Central and Northern New
England to receive lots of snow.” In other
words, cold and snowy. (farmersalamanc.
com/weather/2013/08/25/2014-us-winterforecast).
Now, the wooly worm offers us a slightly
different forecast. According to folklore, the
wooly worm, the larvae of the Isabella tiger
moth, can give us a fairly accurate prediction
of the upcoming winter’s weather. The wooly
worm has three stripes, two black with a rusty
brown stripe in the middle. It is said that the
larger the brown stripe, the milder the winter.
Some wooly worm aficionados go so far as to
count the stripes to see how many weeks of
bad weather there will be as opposed to good
weather. Although the wooly worm doesn’t tell
us how much snow we will have, he does give
us a bit more detail than the Almanac. Starting
with his head, our fuzzy little guy here predicts
the following (based on interpretations of my
husband, Ted, and me):
We will start with some cold and
snow, (about three weeks, if you count the
black stripes), followed by milder, less snowy
weather (about four weeks according to the
rusty brown stripes), and will end with more
snow and colder temperatures (six weeks, the
remaining black stripes). Pretty scientific,
wouldn’t you say?
Ted Shapiro, our local WAGM
weatherman says we have to consider the
character of the winter. He predicts that this
winter will be one with cold that “holds,’
meaning we won’t have many thaws or warm
WINTER 2014
11