As I was out for a walk around the neighborhood, a woolly bear caterpillar boldly crossed my path. I stopped to look at him. His body was black in a quarter of the head area. The other three-quarters wore a thick brown coat. I remembered that there was something about a woolly bear’s fur that was supposed to give you a clue as to the severity of the upcoming winter weather. But it’s been too long since I’ve heard the details.

So, I searched the web. I found out right away that this caterpillar is supposed to have black on both ends. One wonders if what I saw was an impostor or a freak of nature. Maybe it would be faster in a race. Some cities still revere the predictive powers of this caterpillar and honor the insect with an annual festival. But of course, a festival won’t hold a crowd’s interest for long unless there’s some action going on. So they go on caterpillar races and tell stories about the woolly bear, which is actually the larva stage of Isabella Tiger Moth. Did you know that these caterpillars are found as far north as the Arctic, where they freeze (go into a cryogenic state)? They are thawed in the spring to eat and fatten up before turning into moths.

Now, I know you don’t want me to neglect the winter weather prediction powers of “Punxsutawney Phil” the groundhog. You know how it works. It comes out of its lair, or is dragged away, on February 2 (Groundhog Day), where it will or will not see its own shadow. If you see it, the groundhog returns to its den because it has predicted six more weeks of harsh winter weather. Of course, this is a trick. If the sun comes out when they drag it, he Will see your shadow. No one has said this, but if Phil casts his shadow on a woolly bear wearing a narrow brown stripe, we should all hide in his groundhog den because “snowpocalypse” or “snowmageddon” is coming!

I heard weather boys and girls talk on TV about dew point, an occluded front, and Tor Con, but when the weather gets serious, like when a hurricane hits the east coast of the US, they change the conversation to the computer. -generated models. Most of them hedge their bets on the American or European computing model. So are we to believe that computers more accurately predict our pending winter weather and that our weather analysts simply read computer-generated data? What happened to the woolly bear? Have meteorologists lost confidence in its power to predict winter gravity? I do not think so. My theory is that each of those climate experts has one and they consult with their woolly bear before they tell us what the computer said.