We came home from vacation to a chilly Chicago, though the week ended with a couple gloriously sunny days. One of my favorite markers of the transition to autumn is what I refer to as the wooly bear stampede. Sometime toward the end of September a half mile stretch of trail at one of my favorite forest preserves is suddenly full of wooly bear caterpillars dashing (relatively speaking) from one side of the path to the other. I assume they are in search of the perfect place to spin their cocoons for the coming winter, but dont know for sure. Today there were dozens of the little fuzzy critters on the path. In another week there will likely be hundreds. This little fellow sprinted about three feet during this 9 second video. Oh, and all the wooly bears I saw had evenly sized stripes, so we can expect an average winter. (Last year the wide, wide center stripe foretold the extreme winter that we experienced here more accurately than the Old Farmers Almanac.)
Posted on: Fri, 19 Sep 2014 03:29:18 +0000
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