Video posted to YouTube by BAUERANDBENTLE.
“Grandma thinks the worm is ‘interesting’. I like the good just-for-hanging-out-with-the-teddy music …”
We wouldn’t have know about woolly bear worms at all if it wasn’t for a lovely reader (she gets what this blog is about!) who posted, Where are You Headed, Little Wooly Worm? Check that post by Jumping in Mud Puddles. She has a nice blog with great stories, by the way.
It looks like in some places these are called “woolly bears” and in others “wooly worms,” so Gypsy and I compromised and joined both in a concerted team effort to create more confusion.
Woolly Worm Bears start out like this:
And end up as moths that look like this:
Photograph via wikipedia courtesy of Bruce Marlin under the Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 Unported license.
Local folklore of the American Northeast holds that that “woolly bears” have the ability to predict the weather, similar to that of the Groundhog. The forthcoming severity of a winter may be indicated by the amount of black on the Isabella tiger moth‘s caterpillar, the most familiar woolly bear in North America; more brown than black means a fair winter, but more black than brown means a harsh winter. However, the relative width of the black band varies among instars, not according to weather.The mythical qualities attributed to woolly bears in the American Northeast have led to such things as the Woollybear Festival. Wikipedia
Thank you for mentioning my blog on woolly worms. That was very nice of you!