A Cold, Wet California Winter Ahead?

Sometimes you have to wonder if nature is just smarter than humans. Even at this late date, we are so limited in our abilities to predict the weather. Yet the lesser critters, even something so stupid as a bug or a squirrel, sometimes seem to be smarter than all the world's weathermen and their computers combined. But are they really?

At the local college, the observant rural students have been coming in during the summer reporting that, based on some sort of observation involving woolly caterpillars, this coming winter is going to be very cold and wet. The forecasting has something to do with the ratio of red banding to black background on the woollybear's body.

A woolly caterpillar turns into one of these moths. This is an Isabella Moth.

In 1948, William Curran, an entomologist at the Museum of Natural History in New York undertook a study of woollybears and subsequent winter weather. After 10 years, the woollybears showed 70% accuracy in predicting winter weather conditions, which is a pretty good rate.

However, there were problems with this study. In fact, more recent research has crushed the notion that the colors or hairs on a woollybear's back are able to predict anything about the coming winter.

Woollybears don't predict a damn thing, unfortunately. But they sure are nice to look at.

I am a bit ashamed to admit that when I was a boy, undergoing the masculine socialization that forges one into a man, my brothers and I used to torture these bugs. Specifically, we had "bullfights" with them, whereby we would put the woolybear in the "bullring" (a cleared dirt area) and then attack it by throwing "picadors" at them. That's kind of a sick joke.

Picadors are the spears the bullfighter uses to spear the bull while he fights it. Those are the spears you see hanging out of the bull's body as the fight goes on. In our case, "picadors" were, ludicrously, large, thick nails that we had stolen from the workmen building the housing tract in back of us.

It sounds gruesome, but I think this kind of trial by fire socialization is necessary for a masculine self-image. There were boys I grew up who liked to stay inside baking muffins with Mom, and I was always glad I never took that route. I figure they either ended up gay or bi or if not, they had self-image problems in adulthood. Males ignore masculinity at their peril.

Now, from Beasore Meadows east of here at 7000 feet in the Sierra Nevada Mountains, we hear of some genius squirrels blessed with the gift of precognition. The squirrels at Beasore have been going "absolutely nuts", says the report. That means they have been going crazy storing up acorns and whatnot in their little stashes. They do that when they think it is going to be a cold and hard winter ahead. Smart lil critters, eh?

Jones Store at Beasore Meadows. Beautiful, huh? I had a friend a while back who was not getting along well with his wife. He had basically given up on women altogether in his late 40's by then. He could not just move out, so he took up a new residence here at Beasore in the off-season. He would drive all the way down to Oakhurst in the daytime every day and hang out at the coffee shop all day with us.

Then in the evening he would head back up to Beasore and spend the night up there at 7000 feet. He was either alone there, or sometimes there was one other guy living there too. I thought it sounded horribly lonely, but he said it was paradise. Shades of Thoreau?

Yet the American Museum of Natural History claims that not only woollybears, but no animals whatsoever, are able to predict the weather.

But then there are those tantalizing stories about fish, snowshoe hares and black bears, from Alaskan Indians, which, while we are tempted to discount them, let us recall that they are based on centuries of observation of animal behaviors, and that observation is the backbone of any scientific research.

Here it is, the second to last day of summer, and it has already been unseasonably cold for a few days now at least. Supposedly it snowed higher up, above 6000 feet, which is a little unusual for September. I took a drive up Highway 41 to Fish Camp and looked at the surrounding peaks but I could not see a trace of snow. Supposedly it all melted off right away.

This is the Marriott Hotel at Fish Camp. It's quite expensive at about $200-300 a night. I complained about that once, saying that why should only rich people be able to stay in the mountains, and a friend of mine who worked there called me a "Maoist" for saying that. America is a funny place.

A bed and breakfast in Fish Camp, California, just outside Yosemite National Park.

The Big Creek Bed and Breakfast in Fish Camp during the winter. Nice, eh?

This is what Highway 41 just south of Fish Camp looks like in wintertime. This part of the Sierra National Forest is an interesting place. The Southwestern Willow Flycatcher, an endangered species that is extremely rare in these parts, has been spotted at a campground north of Fish Camp during the 1990's.

This bird has been going extinct in the Sierras purely due to high elevation cattle grazing (an insanely destructive process here in the Sierras) and for no other reason. Forest Service "biologists" (some of the biggest liars I have ever met) have been going into contortions to deny this obvious fact for many years.


The Pacific Fisher, a rare furbearer that desperately needs to be listed on the Endangered Species Act, was recorded during the 1990's at Westfall Ranger Station, near where the snowy photo above was taken. I am amazed that fishers have survived up there at all. They are going extinct in the Sierras primarily due to loss of old growth forest habitat.

Their habitat is becoming so fragmented that either the females or the males (I forget which) are having to enlarge their territories in order to get enough food to survive. Since their territory is so much larger than it ought to be due to crappy habitat, the critters expend so much energy running around their territory stuffing their faces that they do not have enough energy left over to mate. Hell of a way to go extinct, huh? Work yourself to death and no sex either.

Even if you spend a lot of time hiking in the mountains, consider yourself lucky if you ever see a fisher.

An interesting fact about these predators is that there is just about no North American mammal that can climb trees, jump from tree to tree, etc., like these things do. Some of the reports of early naturalists are just amazing. Also, they don't have anything to do with fishing. It's just a stupid name that stuck for some reason.

Bad winter? Or good winter? We are coming off one of the worst drought years in decades. At least the fires are apparently over!

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