![]() ![]() But he never published this one-probably because he knew it wouldn’t stand up to peer review.” “It’s a wonderful story, but I do think it was a tongue-in-cheek endeavor,” Boggs says. He found that if the worms he collected had brown markings on more than a third of their body, winters tended to be milder. So, each fall for eight years, he and a fellow entomologist and their wives traveled to Bear Mountain State Park along New York’s Hudson River to collect woolly worms. According to the legend, Curran heard about the woolly worm caterpillar myth and decided to test it for himself. “I really love the story of Curran,” says Joe Boggs, an entomologist at Ohio State University Extension who has studied woolly worms. The Kiwanis Club runs the Woolly Worm Festival in partnership with the Banner Elk Chamber of Commerce. The most often cited is a small trial that American Museum of Natural History entomologist Howard Curran conducted in 1948. Scientific studies on worm forecasting are few and far between. “This past winter was absolutely spot on.” Can woolly worms really predict the weather? But Burleson says it’s stunningly accurate in the time he’s been worm-reading, his predictions have been correct “87 to 90 percent of the time,” he asserts. No one seems to know exactly where the forecasting technique started. The approach was handed down to Burleson from former worm readers, who, in turn, learned it from generations before them. The foremost segment corresponds with the first week of winter the tail-end segment corresponds with the last. ![]() To read a worm, you start near the head and move backward from there. And then if you have ‘fleck,’ which is a band that has a combination of brown and black: That’s going to be below-average temperatures with frost or maybe a little bit of ice in the morning.” If it’s a light brown, that’s above-average temperatures. Here in Avery County, that’s about 27 degrees Fahrenheit. If it’s what we call ‘amber,’ which is a dark brown, temperatures are going to be right around average. “If the segment is black, that’s going to be below-average temperatures with snow. Those are the 13 weeks of winter,” Burleson says. “In reading the worm, you break it down into 13 segments. The winning woolly worm caterpillar ( Pyrrharctia isabella) gets the honor of predicting the weather for the winter to come.Ĭreative Touch Imaging Ltd./NurPhoto via Getty Images The method, he explains, is very specific. That’s not surprising he’s been the festival’s official “worm reader” for the past 30 years. But the caterpillar myth has been one of the most persistent, and it’s certainly the only one with serious competition behind it.īut is there any truth to it? How to read a wormĪsk Tommy Burleson if the caterpillars’ predictions have merit, and his answer is an emphatic yes. August fog means a snowy winter, and low beehives portend a blizzard. The tradition runs deep, and the stakes are high: The winning human gets a $1,000 prize, and the winning woolly worm caterpillar ( Pyrrharctia isabella) gets the honor of predicting the weather for the winter to come.įolk traditions are common in this part of the country. The creepy-crawly contest is at the center of the annual Woolly Worm Festival, a fiercely popular local event that’s been going on for nearly half a century. Last weekend, thousands of people flooded into a tiny town in North Carolina to watch caterpillars race.
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