RIVER CITY JOURNAL: PERSIMMON SEEDS? WOOLLY WORMS? TRY BEES AND HUMMINGBIRDS

If you want to know what winter is going to be like, wait until next spring. Or put up a hummingbird feeder. Your choice.

There are little hints about the winter to come all around us. I can't tell you how many times I've heard about woolly worms and persimmons in the past couple of weeks.

We had a story recently saying the woolly worms this fall are sporting tan coats with black spots on them. According to weather lore, this means a normal winter. An all-tan woolly worm indicates a mild winter, and an all-black woolly worm means a harsh winter. That's what folks say, anyway.

Even though the woolly worms in the story were mostly tan, their cousins at my house are all coal black. They're cute things, wiggling across the brick patio.

I'm worried that the rest of Southeast Missouri is going to have a so-so winter, but the snow and ice are going to pile up against my back door. Either the woolly worms are right, or they aren't, and I know a lot of good people who swear by bugs.

While the rest of the world appears to have a lot of faith in the color of a woolly worm when it comes to winter forecasting, I'm more inclined to wonder about something that is never addressed when woolly worms come up.

What does a woolly worm grow up to be?

I check the dictionary, and I can find listings for woolly aphids, woolly mammoths and woolly bears. I haven't seen any bears on my patio, so I think I can cross them off the list.

Surely woolly worms exist for more than weather folklore. Nobody ever wants to talk about that.

See for yourself. The next time someone starts talking about tan woolly worms or black woolly worms or spotted woolly worms, just ask -- and be polite about it -- if anyone knows what a woolly worm turns into.

You'll probably get some cold stares -- another good indicator of weather to come -- but few answers.

Another bit of weather folklore has to do with persimmon seeds. The persimmons I've seen so far this fall are big and plump. But you have to look inside the seed to see what kind of winter to expect. A fellow here at work said someone has found a persimmon seed with a shovel inside, meaning there will be lots of snow.

Maybe.

Maybe not.

We'll all know for sure next spring.

I've discovered two highly reliable weather indicators. One is my right knee joint, which aches every time a storm is approaching. Lots of you have aching knees or elbows or necks, and some of you can actually predict precipitation down to the closest hundredth of an inch. My knee is new to weather forecasting, so all it tells me is when it's going to thunder and rain. Maybe my knee will get better at weather forecasting as the years roll around.

The other reliable indicator is the hummingbird feeder hanging outside the kitchen window. During this past summer, I noticed one day that the feeder was low but not empty. The next day the feeder looked empty, and a big storm blew up. The day after the storm there was red liquid in the feeder again.

After this I started watching the hummingbird feeder. And, sure enough, before every storm the red liquid would go down, sometimes too low to be seen, and then come back up with sunny weather.

Imagine that. The Weather Service spends billions of dollars on radar and a cable-TV connection so the meteorologists can watch the Weather Channel. And all they had to do was put out a hummingbird feeder.

By the way, we now have three hummingbird feeders -- I really want to know what tomorrow's weather is going to be. One of them has been taken over by bees. Lots of bees.

I'll bet how many bees there are at a hummingbird feeder tells you what winter is going to be like. Well, let me tell you, we're in for a humdinger.

There are so many bees, in fact, that the woolly worms have all put on their thick, black coats around my house.

~R. Joe Sullivan is the editor of the Southeast Missourian.