Looking for a home: the mass migration of woolly bears

Harvest Moon

Fall is a time of change and transition.  Geese chevron the sky, crows gather in murders to head south, and the cool night temperatures have deer and moose are once again moving from the deep canopy of woods to fields.  Ravens and foxes roam  the back meadow, mowed earlier and now green with new grass and clover, hunting voles and mice that are equally busy gathering nuts and seeds for their winter cache. The roads are filled with harvesters and threshers, and antique tractors pressed into service gathering potatoes and broccoli. The solid green of the summer woods is bedecked in hues of red and gold and copper, and the leaves on the poplars shiver first gold then silver in the freshening winds. Everything is changing, but around the end of September, one peculiar pilgrimage, the likes of which we had never seen before moving here, takes place: the woolly bear mass migration to our garage.

Woolly bears are those fuzzy ebony and burnt orange caterpillars that look like short, plump pipe cleaners, and that have long been viewed as a predictor of winter’s severity. 
Common knowledge is that a narrow band of orange flanked by wider black bands on either end means heavy snows, while the plumpness of the fuzzy crawler measures cold.  The plumper, the colder. The Farmer’s Almanac, a bastion of folk wisdom, especially about weather, and published right here in Maine, often includes the findings of woolly bear watchers, generally with mixed results.  Of course, that esteemed publication warns that one should also consider the acorn fall and the subsequent squirrel activity along with the band width and plumpness of woolly bears.  It’s too cold here for either oaks or large populations of gray squirrels, so we have no way to confirm the woolly lore we see creeping around us

The only true study of how savvy the furry crawler is at predicting winter weather took place more than a half century ago when a curator at the American Museum of Natural History rounded up all the woolly bears he could find in the Hudson Valley north of New York City and began measuring the stripes.  The study took place over eight years, and what he concluded about the reliability of the folk knowledge seems to have been lost to history.  That hasn’t affected how people view these little crawlers, especially those of us who live in the far north and know that the weather can change in a heartbeat.  Any early warning of what winter is likely to bring and when is always welcome. It’s why we pay attention when they begin their march, and march it is.

About midday, they crawl from the thick green of the fall lawn, emerging a few at a time, and begin heading east, up the driveway, toward the garage. As the sun passes overhead, hovering for just the briefest of times near noon, the numbers increase, and the pace quickens. Phalanx after phalanx of woolly bears move with remarkable speed over the sun-warmed asphalt, right into the shadowy coolness of the garage, and there they slow down.    Not a dozen or even two, not a score, but more.  They come in pairs and solo until the entire driveway is covered with undulating little bits of black and orange, and a casual stroll around the house yields a hundred or maybe two.  They come persistently, day after day, seeking a winter home. 

The march of the woollies

We have long been familiar with woolly bears and their mythologized ability to predict the coming winter.  We are, after all, northerners, used to hearing and believing the knowledge and lore of those who came before us.  As children, we scooped the caterpillars into cupped hands and watched as they rolled themselves into tight little spheres of fluff, resting lightly in our childish palms, and today, the grandkids do the same.  That the woolly bears roll up into tight little balls and play dead like an opossum is particularly intriguing to little folks. As adults, the first sighting of a woolly bear sends a shiver of anticipation, both joyful and fearful, at the thought of the coming winter. Young and old, they intrigue us in the same way the garage, or perhaps I should say doorways, intrigue them. 

We do not know exactly what it is about the garage that attracts them, what their steady marching across the cooling ground means, and so we are left to speculate, piecing together perceptions and misperceptions of the behavior of woolly bears. Until I looked them up this year, we did not know what stage of life this is for them, how long they live, or even what they become. We simply know that they come, over and over again, in numbers that are astounding. Can there really be that many caterpillars in the world?

Bruce worries about them, fears that they will come into our winter-icy garage, find a crack in which to hide and, as he puts it, freeze-dry themselves to death.  He scoops them up and tosses them back onto the lawn, but they are relentless, single-minded, and in a very few minutes, they are back on the driveway, marching toward the garage.  We had long assumed that the woollies pupated into Monarchs – someone must have told us that at some time – and as we love butterflies both for their beauty and for their ability to help pollinate flowers and herbs, vegetables and fruits, we encourage them as neighbors.  Who lets their neighbors freeze to death?  With each year we have lived here, the numbers of woolly bears increased while the number of Monarchs did not. It was a mystery.

Woolly bears love cold climes, surviving, nay, thriving even as far north as the Arctic, and they are uniquely suited for chilly climes, and  they do not pupate into Monarchs.  Rather, the woolly bear is the larva of the Isabella tiger moth that, although a pretty enough moth, is no Monarch, and although I have nothing to which I can compare the journey it takes to become that moth, it seems to have an unusual life cycle. 

The woolly bear emerges in all its black and orange glory in the fall from an egg buried all summer in the soil, and then rushes about trying to find a place to overwinter. Some are plump and fat – two inches long, a half inch wide – and some are tiny, barely a half inch in length and thin, but all in search of shelter, it seems. That  means finding a spot where the caterpillar can safely freeze and lie undisturbed through the winter.   That’s right, the woolly bears literally freezes solid. What allows the caterpillar to do this is something called a cryoprotectant, which is a substance that keeps tissue from being damaged when it freezes.  It’s common in some species of Arctic and Antarctic fish.  In the woolly bear, freezing is a process. First its heart stops beating, then the gut, and finally the rest of the body, and there it is, freeze-dried woolly bear, and so it remains until spring.  It then thaws out and pupates before becoming the moth.  For some reason, our garage is an attractive location for their winter snooze and metamorphosis. 

We don’t see a lot of the moths, which leads us to believe they are probably good food for the tenants in the bat house fifteen feet up the utility pole, but the number of woolly bears that show up each year seems to continue to rise, and each one seems convinced the garage is the best place to be.  Even though we know they will not perish if they winter in the garage, Bruce still scoops them up and tosses them back on to the lawn, because he is tired of stepping on them or squashing them when he picks up a basket or bucket, toolbox or piece of wood under which the fuzzies have hidden, preparing for their winter sleep. And the caterpillars still turn around and march right back to the garage. Although their pace is slower as the temps get lower, they still stroll through open doors, squeeze in through tiny cracks, wiggle under the rubber jam of the overhead door, and queue up along the rear foundation.  They are so common and plentiful that even the dogs no longer take notice of the tiny black and orange undulating bodies and instead, step around them, more concerned with the red squirrels that have begun to dart back and forth across the road, preparing, too, for the coming cold when woolly bears will be a distant memory, along with the last glorious days of fall. And we too hasten our preparations, stacking wood, mulching the garden, planting garlic, canning green tomato pickles and apple sauce, all in anticipation of the long cold days ahead, taking our cues from the woollies who are so relentless in their fall preparations.

Harvest, a gathering together

Approaching Fall

Today the sky is a high, thin blue, scoured clean by the line storms that for four days marched across the state, flooding roads, toppling trees and power lines, and ushering out what is sure to have been the last humid days of summer.  At dawn a thin ridge of pale gray cloud, the only remnant of the line storms edges the western sky, and the freshening wind blows cooler, drying the water bejeweled grasses along the road.  The wild white and purple asters are fading, their starry blossoms drooping toward the spongy ground, poised to drop seed for next year’s bloom, and the goldenrod is withered, brown at the edges of the once golden banners. Jewelweed, Queen Anne’s lace, and Joe Pye weed along the road have faded but Virginia creeper, brilliant scarlet from early frost, climbs alders and cherries, birches and poplars.   

September is moody and capricious, a mix of warm golden days that quickly give way to cold rain and the dark lowered skies that bring violent thunderstorms.   Often, we are rewarded by a rainbow in the eastern sky as the storms rush off to Canada.  We blame the cold fronts sweeping down from around the Hudson Bay, colliding with warm tropical fronts moving north along the coast, and stripping away summer. The days are cooler now, razor-sharp with the promise of winter.  This morning as we walked the dogs, the still damp gravel of the road is littered with pine cone petals dropped by raucous jays that have returned from their summer farther north and red squirrels bold little thieves that are storing up for winter.   The choke cherries are gone and along with them, the warblers and goldfinches that have fed on them the last few weeks.

  This morning as I drove to town, Canada goose families gathered to share breakfast and make travel plans in the newly mown oat fields, and at the big potato farms, workers were out servicing equipment, working in shirt sleeves in the sun, prepping to begin the harvest that grips The County. Although many schools have abandoned the harvest break – two or three weeks off in late September and early October – a few still let the students out to spend long hard days picking and sorting potatoes and rocks as dinosaur-big diggers lumber across the countryside.  Although teens are usually the only ones who still engage in the annual harvest, it is too costly to run buses just for the elementary schoolers so they too are given a few weeks of freedom in what may be the last days of warm weather before the onset of the long, dark winter.  My friend, Shonna Milliken Humphrey, herself a County girl, wrote eloquently, lyrically, and often brutally of the punishing work that agriculture is, and when I find myself picking up her book, Show Me Good Land,  to reread it every fall, I am grateful to those who grow and harvest the food that so many of us take for granted.  There is nothing easy about farming.

The whine of chainsaws and the rattle of wood being tossed into trucks echo from the forests around us, often punctuated by the sound of gunshots – an eager hunter sighting in his rifle before deer season opens.  Woodpiles sprout and grow by back doors, and empty garage bays are filled with fragrant blond maple and birch that will warm toes and souls throughout the snowy days ahead.  Dawn comes later and night arrives earlier. 

The first of September marks the opening of bear season, and guides have been out setting up bait sites and stands for would-be hunters who come north from the southern part of Maine and beyond, hoping to bag a big bear. But bears are elusive, preferring their own company to that of humans, so here they are hunted over dogs, rangy hounds with floppy ears, snared, and at bait sites. Guides and private citizens use old donuts and other food that sweet-toothed bears can’t resist to draw them to one location where hunters wait in tree stands to shoot the hapless and hungry bruins. The practices often draw broad public criticism as being inhumane and unsportsmanlike, and this year, as happens every few years, animal advocates are mounting a campaign to outlaw these practices.   

I’m not sure how I feel about this approach to hunting. On one hand, it runs counter to everything that I was ever taught about hunting, as do “heater hunters” who hunt deer from the warmth of their trucks, getting out only to stand at the side of the road to shoot a deer.  State laws tightly control bear hunting practices, and wardens are aggressive in tracking down those who don’t play by the rules, and bears are elusive, quick to run from the sight of a human.   But I also know that as people push farther and farther into wildlife habitat, and if bear populations grow rapidly, there are likely to be unpleasant encounters between man and animal.   

The cooler temperatures have us longing for heartier meals; pot roasts, mac and cheese, stews and chowders, roasted chickens.   The days of throwing something on the grill are waning fast, and before long, the house will be redolent with the aromas of roasting, baking, and stewing meals.  We quicken our steps as we go throw our own harvest.  The last of the green beans need picked, as do the shell and baking beans, and there are cucumbers for relishes and pickles, a bushel or so of corn, and onions, leeks, beets, and carrots still to be pulled and dug and tucked away for winter meals.

Drying garlic

Apples, a bumper crop this year, hang like heavy rosy pendants from the trees, and sometime in the next week or so, Bruce will take the bushel baskets and head out to pick for cider and sauce that carry us through a variety of dishes and desserts.

We lost most of our tomatoes this year to late blight, caused in part by the unusually wet summer, which rampages through the potato fields and then gets carried in on the wind and by birds to tomatoes, which are in the same family as potatoes.  We wonder sometimes if the local farmers rely too much on chemicals to control a biological condition, which is what blight is. It’s a fungus, designed to cause things to rot and recycle back into the soil, but it can have devastating effects.  Acres of potatoes sometimes rot in the fields, and the fungal spores with them. 

More and more farmers are practicing crop rotation – potatoes followed by two or three years of planting broccoli, canola, oats, buckwheat, and recently wheat – but it doesn’t seem enough.  Some enterprising farmers are opening up abandoned fields or leasing fields that have long been used only for hay as a way to begin to control the blight.  That poses a whole new set of problems in that it leaves those who raise beef or other meat animals for sale and horse owners scrambling to find good hay.

Living this far north and this far out is a near constant gamble and scramble, but it makes us resilient, persistent and adaptable, and in today’s uncertain world, those are good characteristics to have. 

There is a season ...

GARDEN AT DUSK

One morning in late August, we wake to find summer tumbling down.  The sun rises later and when I pull myself from bed at 5:30 to take the dogs out, the air is chill and shadowy, the dawn a faint peach glow against the eastern horizon. The grass is damp with night dew and the world is silent.  The birds that chirruped and trilled throughout the warmer days have raised and sent their families out on their own, so there is no cacophony over staking territory. The deer that have spent the night grazing our fields disappear, ghostlike into the woods. On the distant hills, a few precocious maples show hints of orange and red, vague promises of the color to come. The change makes us restless.

The west wind has an edge that scatters the thin fog hovering in the overgrown meadow across the road and quickens our steps as we walk the dogs.  They too feel the change, their heads higher, searching the breeze and the road ahead, and they fling themselves into the shaggy bushes along the roadside, tails wagging ferociously, noses quivering in search of the small creatures that scurry through the underbrush. 

 

 Flocks of starlings and grackles rise alarmed from the spruces and school together against the brightening sky, and the chickadees and other small warblers flit through the fading leaves of the alders and chokecherries.  

The change quickens our labors; there is much to do before temperatures plummet and snow sheaths the green of trees and meadows.  The garden that we fretted over all summer has grown into a ripe lushness that demands our attention. There are peas and beans to pick and beets to pull and garlic to braid.  The tomatoes are so thick and laden with barely ripening fruit that to venture into the patch is like wading into a jungle.  The corn – Golden Bantam and Ashworth – is nearly as tall as an elephant’s eye and on each stalk, three to four ears are plumping, scarved in tawny silk. 

Pumpkins and winter squashes are starting to turn deep orange, and the New England Long pie pumpkins that we pick green and store in the kitchen are plump zeppelins promising great pies and muffins and soups when January’s blast demands something sweet and soothing to eat.  The kitchen has become a processing facility, and husband Bruce freezes a half dozen quarts of vegetables a day, while I turn out jars and jars of jams and jellies and pickles and relishes early every Saturday morning. 

The fields are mown, and the bales stacked neatly alongside the berry beds and the garden, and in the golden glory of late August, the world seems content to simply bask in what may well be the last warm rays of sun.  But there is still much to do. 

Wood must be ordered, then stacked and covered.  The snow blower has to be tuned, the shovel edges sharpened and a home found for this year’s new lawn chairs.  Quilts and comforters need to be unpacked, spilling from the totes smelling of lavender and then hung for airing before they are put on the beds, and snow tires pulled down from the garage rafters.   

We need to order meat: lamb and chicken and turkeys, maybe a shoulder of beef from friends, and freezers must be cleaned out to be ready for them when they come from the butcher.  There are herbs to be gathered and hung to dry and others to be divided and planted in new spots. The weather service warns of frost and we patiently wait for the wind to die, and then rush from the house in the thick dusk to drape the plants with tarps and old bed sheets, protection against the inevitable cold that blows in from Canada.

We are busy with taking stock and planning ahead.  Meals become more substantial; hearty soups laden with the garden’s provender, and the house is fragrant with the aroma of drying herbs hung on the pot rack. The table is laden with jars of pickles and relishes, jams and jellies that must be stacked carefully in the pantry cabinet, and in this interlude between summer and winter, the world quiets and slows.  At night, when we take the dogs out, the sky is black and distant; the Milky Way is a pale ribbon of other worlds and stars winking a hello to our tiny planet.  We pull our jackets closer, inhale the cold, clean air and retreat to the light and warmth, bracing for the inevitability of winter. 

 Night Fall