Reflections - Predicting the Nasties?

Fall on West Creek Road

My sister Anita inspired my early fall hunts. Years back, she had emailed from New Jersey. I haven’t seen any woolly bears this year. Have you? 

Weary of shoveling snow and scraping ice, she turned to woolly bear caterpillars, famous for predicting the severity of winter.

Leaves turned golden-orange and red this September. On daily walks with Spence, I scanned the road for the caterpillar with fuzzy orange and black stripes, a natural for Halloween. This year the first woolly bear, a future Isabella tiger moth, crawled past on September 23. Woolly bear numbers increased to four a day, six a day, then more than a dozen.

Giddy as a youngster collecting Easter eggs, I kept my head bent. I didn’t count the all-black (the giant leopard moth) or the all orange-yellow (the yellow woolly bear of the Virginia tiger moth) caterpillars. They aren’t woolly bears. I also rejected smashed garter snakes. Stepping over the third one on a day in early October, I asked Spence, “Why are there so many dead snakes in the road?”

“They’re migrating.”

“You’re kidding.”

“No, they travel miles.” He shoved his hands into jeans pockets. “They hibernate underground in groups of hundreds.”

I preferred looking at the smashed snakes to the vision his answer gave me.

Three weeks into the woolly bear hunts, I suggested a variation. “Let’s play the cow game with woolly bears.” I hadn’t worked out the rules for multiplying the total, like a church marries the cows to double the herd, or killing the critters by passing a graveyard before Spence blurted, “Snakes kill them.”

Third Woolly Bear Caterpillar of the Year

We spied four creeping woolly bears but smashed snakes did the caterpillars in. The dead snakes flattened more each day but didn’t disappear. I gave up on the woolly cow-bear game but not the hunt. As woolly bears found places to hibernate, their numbers dwindled to one every other day or so. One cute black and orange body undulating across the road begged to be petted. I stroked its fuzzy hairs with my finger causing the caterpillar to curl into a ball and Spence to admonish, “Don’t leave it there. Kathy will run over it. Put it on the side.”

I lifted the fuzzy ball, whispered “I’m sorry,” and placed it on a red maple leaf at the edge of the road. The caterpillar stayed curled and, like a pie chart, displayed one-third black at its head, a long orange middle, and a tiny black posterior. Nearly all woolly bears sported that same pattern this season. Unique. Most years the width of stripes varies from caterpillar to caterpillar. I emailed photos of four woolly bears for my sister’s analysis. 

From the looks of your woolly bears, she wrote, I would say a nasty start to winter with a decent mild streak before the end week or two of more nasties . . . We will see once it starts.

I checked woolly bear predictions’ accuracy online. 

Dr. C. H. Curran ran experiments in the early 1950s and calculated 80% accuracy. He gave up in 1955, however, because the woolly bears’ stripes varied too much. No one has been able to reproduce his research. Mike Peters, an entomologist, says the older the caterpillar, the more times it has shed skin, and the more brown hairs it grows. I trusted his research despite his sense of color—calling the stripe, which my quilter’s eye perceives as orange, brown.

I tested the entomologist’s theory.

Paging through my farm journals for last winter, I counted snow days and days with high temperatures below freezing. A pattern emerged. Snow and below-freezing temperatures dominated the middle five weeks of winter. The first four weeks had seven nasty days but scattered—not one after another. The last four weeks had only three wintry days.

This years’ crop of woolly bears recorded that pattern precisely. A longer black stripe by the head represented the cooler beginning of winter, the long stretch of orange indicated the mere five weeks of wintry weather, and the short black posterior recorded the mild end. The woolly bears also predicted the overall mildness of the winter. Every day the temperature rose at least to the low 20s F [-5° or -6 °C]. No arctic blasts. 

Winter will come. I’ll track the weather and predict the pattern for next year’s woolly bears. But I can wait. I’m still enjoying fall.

Leaves, copper and crimson, glow.

Leaves, under squirrel feet, crunch.

Leaves, decomposing, perfume.

Maple Leaves

 Reflections - Walnut Snatcher

Baskets of Black Walnuts

The cats discovered the theft Monday morning, October 4. Sitting side by side by side on the hewn log table, they gazed through the window at the porch desk. Tails twitched. Ears swiveled. Ande whimpered. Eh eh eh.

If one of the brothers had acted that way, I would have suspected a butterfly or grasshopper. All three meant a critter like the mouse with a nest of babies under Spence’s printer or the gray squirrel that carved wood sculptures. I mentally rooted for the mouse because of our black walnuts. Mice don’t have the teeth to gnaw through walnuts. Squirrels do. 

Our venerable black walnut tree dropped fruit with each wind event starting late summer. Though plum size at first, I scooped up every lime-green fruit, fingered the bumpy husks, and inhaled their spicy fragrance. I stored the first nuts in an empty flowerpot on the porch desk. 

Fall came. The walnut tree dropped lemon size fruit. Spence and I crisscrossed the yard under the old walnut tree as if following the lines on a checkerboard. I stuffed the fruit into my picking apron. Spence dropped them into a five-gallon bucket. We transferred the fruit to a bushel basket and covered the bounty with newspapers to hide it from the squirrels. 

 I even lured others into snatching the walnuts away from squirrels. When our nephew Patrick came to haul away the old dryer, I bent to great-niece eye level and used my excited first-grade teacher voice. “Want to go on a walnut hunt?”

Addy, age six, whooped.

Amelia, age four, hopped.

Their grandma Cindy gave me a thumbs-up signal. “That sounds like fun.”

Chestnut-brown hair swaying, Addy leapt across the yard as gracefully as deer leapt over Spence’s garden fence. Searching for the camouflaged fruits in the six-inch grass tickled her sense of adventure. “I found one!” She snatched the fruit and tossed it into Spence’s five-gallon bucket or into the bushel basket her sister and I had fetched from the garage. Thunk. Addy bounded off for more. 

Cherubic Amelia pranced across the grass with her head bent and blonde curls bouncing. She lunged, grabbed a fruit, and dropped it into the bushel basket—never the bucket.

The walnut adventure didn’t hold Addy’s attention for long. “I want to go to the house.”

I glanced from the empty porch to Cindy’s wrinkled forehead. Imaging Patrick and his sister Sarah maneuvering the dryer down the ramp with Addy’s grandpa and great-uncle supervising, I said, “Not yet. We have more walnuts to find.” A twinge of guilt poked my heart because we didn’t have to gather all the walnuts. The squirrels could have a few.

“But I want to see my daddy,” Addy threw her hands to her sides as if trying to reason with a dense old person.

In a soothing voice, Cindy said, “We have to help Aunt Janet.”

Amelia scampered cheerfully through the grass. “Found one!”

I’d stopped picking up walnuts. Instead, I pointed my shoes at the fruit saying, “Here’s one,” for the energetic Amelia to find. 

When no more fruit could be found, Cindy and I glanced at the empty porch, shrugged our shoulders, and granted Addy’s wish. 

I hefted the basket to rest on my hip. Cindy toted the bucket. We marched. On the porch,  I set the bushel basket beside the full one already there, dumped the walnuts from the bucket into the second basket, and called to Spence. “Are they done?”

He rounded the corner. “Yeah. They’re just talking beside the van.”

“Addy wants her daddy.”

Spence cupped his hands and yelled. “Patrick. Addy wants you.”

Within five minutes the six adults selected porch chairs. Addy snuggled on her daddy’s lap. Amelia put a hand on Spence’s knee and pointed to the walnuts. “What’s inside?”

Spence selected a fruit, pulled his utility knife from a pocket, and cut into the husk. 

“Can I do it?” Amelia reached for the knife.

Exposed Walnut and Walnut Brown Fingertip

“No, honey.” He made another incision. “Your hands will turn brown.” Cutting away a section of husk, he exposed the nut. Juice dripped from the fruit, and his fingertip turned walnut brown. 

Amelia clasped her hands behind her back.

Cindy asked. “How do you process black walnuts?”

I explained.

Spread the fruit on the driveway.

Ask Spence to run over them with his tractor.

Twist and scrape the husk off.

Drop the nuts into a bucket of water.

Discard the floaters—they’re empty.

Scrub the sinkers with a wire brush until all the pulp is gone.

Dry the nuts on a screen for a couple of months.

Crack the nuts with a heavy-duty walnut cracker.

“That’s why I never complain about the price of nuts.” 

While the family muttered about grocery bills, I fetched a handful of frozen black walnuts that I’d processed the previous year. To test if frozen nuts were edible, I popped one into my mouth. A bold, earthy flavor exploded over my tongue. Yum. I dumped the nuts into a bowl and went back to the porch. “Only take one at first. Some people don’t like them.”

Addy grabbed one and munched. “They taste okay,” but she didn’t reach for more. 

Spence and Sarah declined. 

Cindy munched. “It has a fruity flavor.” 

Bruce smacked his lips. “Tasty.”

Amelia spat hers onto the floor.

“I don’t like it. But I swallowed mine.” Patrick picked up Amelia’s half-chewed nut and tossed it into the wastebasket. 

If only squirrels had taste buds like Amelia. They don’t. Squirrels fancy walnuts. They would gather all the nuts if Spence and I dallied at harvest time.

Still rooting for a mouse to be mesmerizing the trio of cats, I tiptoed to the porch and stayed a COVID-19 safe distance from the table to give a squirrel jumping room. 

No mouse.

No squirrel.

No walnut sticking out of the husk Spence had cut for Amelia. 

Judging from the husks on the table, the critter had absconded with at least two walnuts.

Squirrels taking nuts under the black walnut tree is fair. I didn’t appreciate them stealing nuts tucked under newspapers on the porch. For a temporary fix, I added a canning kettle lid over one bushel basket and an empty Amazon box over the other. The lid might baffle the squirrel. The flimsy carton wouldn’t. The real fix would be to move the bushel baskets, but each weighed as much as two sewing machines. I left them on the porch desk.  

As if the guard cats had expected me to bring them the thief, their ears, eyes, and tails drooped when I came back empty-handed. 

“We need to move the walnuts into the cold cellar, Spence.” I explained the theft and the gray suspect. 

He jotted a note on his clipboard. “I’ll do it with the dolly.”

The dolly resided in the garage, and the Mahindra—his dolly hauling vehicle—was in the tractor repair shop. I had to wait until we ransomed the tractor on Wednesday.

In the meantime, Rills provided more comfort than the ad hoc covers. He sat on the hewn log table and stared at the porch desk. No body parts twitched.

Three days after the theft, we moved the fruit but not to the cold cellar. We rolled the baskets to the bottom of the ramp and dumped the walnuts into the tractor bucket. 

Spence spread the fruit across the parking pad out front and drove over them to break the husks. He trundled off to gather the latest windfall. 

Dressed in the walnut-stained clothes I only wore for black walnut processing, I pulled on red rubber gloves to cover my hands and forearms. Perched atop a step stool, I grabbed the nearest smashed fruit, twisted the husk off, and scraped the freed nut with an old knife. I scraped off most of the pulp—stringy tan or slimy black depending on the freshness of the fruit. I also scraped off every single wiggling, white maggot.

Wild turkeys clucked in the woods. Spicy walnut fragrance mingled with the scent of decomposing leaves. A large insect landed on the back of my neck. I could feel its feet but couldn’t brush it off with my wet, pulpy gloves. Instead, I wiggled my shoulders until a grasshopper jumped away.

The husking process attracted yellow jackets. They buzzed over the mashed fruit. They landed on the scraped nuts extending their tiny tongues to the juice. The yellow jackets crawled on my pulp-splattered pants and flew at my face. I let the feisty wasps fly wherever they wanted, because, when riled, they sting repeatedly. At least they didn’t steal any walnuts.

Eight days after the walnut theft and four sessions of scraping with yellow jackets later, Spence stored the scraped nuts in the cold cellar. The walnuts are safe from squirrels while I scrub four or five dozen at a time—a task I hope to finish by Thanksgiving.

In the meantime, the cats take turns sitting on the hewn log table and staring out at the porch desk in case the walnut thief returns.

Walnut Processing Clothes

 Reflections - Turtles and Snakes and Salamanders, Oh My

Audubon Community Nature Center Garden

Dear Julie,

I hope you’re enjoying fall, especially the mums you said your dad liked. 

Spence and I met Norma and Bob at the Audubon Community Nature Center in Jamestown, New York. In the main room, we peered into a 4X6X3 foot tank to find Oneka and Tweeg, two female eastern hellbenders. The giant salamanders were over a foot long. Their stony gray faces blended with the rocky bottom. One had crawled into a white pipe. The other lay under a rock and twitched her tail. Were they watching us? Hard to tell. 

Across from their tank, windows overlooked bird feeders. Nuthatches dined at the only one with seeds. The windows had frosted patterns for an experiment. Scientists tested which pattern—thin parallel lines, squares in regular rows and columns, and squares alternating in even and odd rows—if any, reduced birds flying into the glass.

We left the main room and dallied in the live reptile room. I glanced at the California corn snake and the yellow rat snake briefly but stared intently at turtles staring at me.  From Wells Wood encounters, I recognized the box turtle and the wood turtle. I watched the spotted turtle the longest. Its shell had tiny polka dots as if someone had measured and painted them in an exact design. A painted turtle slid off its platform into the water. All four of its legs paddled as it maneuvered and scraped against the glass. It got one leg onto the platform only to slip into the water. Repeatedly. I wanted to reach in and lift the critter to the platform. Norma warned, “No, you can’t do that.” Spence said, “The turtle wouldn’t appreciate your intentions.” I moved on.

Love,

Janet

P.S. If you want to see all ten postcard stories of our Jamestown vacation with Bob and Norma, use this link:

https://sites.google.com/site/wellswoodpa/vacations/visit-with-norma-and-bob-jamestown

View of Audubon Community Nature Center from the Marsh