A Mild Winter for Southeastern Minnesota? Check the Wooly Bear Caterpillars

Do you have a lot of wooly bear caterpillars in your yard this year? We do. And after doing a little research, I found that they might be telling us something about our upcoming winter here in southeastern Minnesota.

The wolly bear caterpillar, or Pyrrharctia isabella, as they're known scientifically, are the larvae that eventually produce the Isabella Tiger Moth. And while they're known to be prevalent in these parts, especially in the fall, I couldn't find much about causes their numbers to be bigger one year than the next. We've had a lot of them around in our backyard the past couple weeks, and I thought that perhaps that was a sign foretelling something about our upcoming winter.

Turns out, while their varying numbers apparently don't have any particular meaning, their color, however, does-- if you put any stock in that sort of thing, of course. According to THIS story, "According to folklore, if the woolly bear caterpillar has more black area than orangish-brown then the winter is going to be long, snowy and cold. If the caterpillar possesses more orangish-brown area then the winter is going to be mild."

Now, in the above picture, which I took in our garden, the caterpillar appears to have a bigger patch of orange/brown area. Which should mean we're in for a milder winter, right? Well, not so fast. The story goes on to say it might be a better picture of what happened LAST winter.

"In reality, the orangish-brown segment on the woolly bear caterpillar indicates whether the last winter was long or short. Whether last year’s winter corresponds to the upcoming winter is anybody’s guess. But informal research since the 1940’s has determined that the folklore of the woolly bear caterpillar’s coloring has been right 70 percent of the time."

Okay. When you compare the winter of 2014-2015 to the previous winter of 2013-2014 here in southeastern Minnesota, I guess it was milder. We didn't have as many bitter cold stretches of 30-below temperatures last winter that we seemed to have had the previous winter, and we didn't seem to have as many big snowstorms, either. So maybe it was a little less harsh. But I don't know if last winter all that much shorter than the previous year, though-- we first got snow in early November, and it lasted pretty much up until March.

So what can we take away from all this? Not much, apparently. I mean, come on, it's not like forecasting the weather is a science, is it?  :)