Well, it is that time of year when people try to predict how severe or mild the coming winter will be. Winter is coming, you know!
Our Arikara Indian friend from Twin Buttes, ND likes to use buffaloberries for prediction. Buffaloberries, aka Shepherdia or Bulberries, are a pictured in the header photo. They are tasty, tart, native berries that grow on shrubs that make lovely jam, jelly, and pie. You can order plants for your yard. Deer, elk, and bison love them. Our friend Bruce says the more productive the buffaloberries, the harsher the winter. I haven’t had a chance to ask Bruce what he has observed as yet. I trust his judgment, but it may only be relevant for north central North Dakota.
Woolybears. The caterpillars that develop into Isabella Tiger Moths. Well, if the black stripes on them are near the front end of the caterpillar, winter will be early. The more black stripes, the more snow and the harsher the winter. The more brown stripes, the more mild the winter. I wonder through, what if the woolybears all have different stripe allocations? Which one do you believe?
I think I have a better source of prediction. Saturday we noticed a house down the street that was having a Christmas light service install their lights. I had no idea such services existed. Humbug Christmas Light Services was on the job. We don’t put up Christmas lights, but how nice for people who want lights but who can’t manage ladders. I think the earlier the lights go up, the earlier the first snow.
What do you think we should use as winter prediction? Be creative. Do you put up outdoor Christmas lights?
I suspect we are in for a mild winter from what I hear weatherwise. I worry it is also going to be dry.
Wildlife seems to have disappeared around here- no turkeys or coyotes this year. Also haven’t seen garter snakes (which we usually have in abundance).
I keep bringing things in against the coming cold though, I have been caught too many times.
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Is it possible that the coyotes have eaten all of the turkeys?
When we get bunnies around my place in the spring, I yearn for more coyotes.
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I favor “always be prepared no matter what you think the prediction is”. Having said this, I will say that it seems as if the bunny population has started to hunker down already. The number of bunnies in the back has really dropped off the last month or so. It’s hard to get worked up about this theory however because I don’t think of bunnies is being all that bright.
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Snort.
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Bunnies are a spring problem around here. THAT’S when I yearn for Coyotes.
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I think I’ve mentioned that when I was in high school my family had a holiday tradition of once or twice during the Christmas light season of driving around and looking at peoples lights. In fact, one year my dad even had a little cards made up that said “Thank you for your Christmas light display. We really enjoyed it”, which we left in people’s mailboxes. This was a part of St. Louis where the mailboxes were all at the end of the driveway so we weren’t traipsing onto people‘s property. So you think I’d be big on Christmas lights, but I am not. I love looking at other folks’ displays – that’s just fine but the effort to put them up, the electricity to pay for them and the take them down is just not my thing. I do you have plenty of holiday decorations inside the house, however.
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We believe in Woolybears. The ones we’ve seen so far are sporting wide brown stripes, which, when combined with a massive El Nino, suggest a mild winter (but one likely punctuated with cold snaps and sudden snow dumps). I do know that putting stakes out to mark our driveway for the snow plows will induce a snow storm! So these stakes are still in storage.
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An image just popped into my head of a cartoon, maybe the Far Side, with a caption something like
“Just look at the whiskers on them cats, Martha – it’s gonna be a hard winter.”
I tried a quick search, but nothin’…
We did outdoor lights for a few years in Robbinsdale, but now just some indoor ones in our 7-window “solarium”, a former front porch. I don’t ever take them down, as they’re not in the way the rest of the year, so I also plug them in on Halloween…
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I usually put lights across the front roofline and in the window box with (artificial) pine boughs. Last year Robin complained that our roofline lights weren’t bright enough, so at the end of the season I bought brighter ones.
One of these days I suppose hanging lights will get to be too much, but not this year. I have brand new lights.
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