Recently there has been some controversy over the wooly bear caterpillars crawling around Sullivan County. At the store in Monticello, we have found two wooly bears that were completely black and in my yard in Eldred, I have found three that were mostly brown with just small amounts of black on each end. That is two completely different forecasts for the winter if you believe wooly bear lore. Talking with customers about the wooly bears I have found similar accounts of all black or mostly brown wooly bears. 

There doesn’t seem to be many variations of the mostly brown caterpillars, they all seem to be mostly brown with just a little black on each end. One customer mentioned that the all black caterpillars are not really wooly bears, that there is another caterpillar out there that is all black. That is correct, but not in our area. The all black caterpillar that the customer was referring to is that of the Giant Leopard Moth which has an all black caterpillar, but their range only come up though parts of New Jersey as our winters are too cold for it here in Sullivan County. So the black caterpillars that have been seen around here are in fact wooly bears. We will just have to wait and see whose forecast is correct. 

Even our own forecasting agencies are coming out with different forecasts for this winter with the Farmer’s Almanac calling for more snow and cold, yet the National Weather Service calling for a milder winter due to El Nino. So even they can’t agree on what the winter will be like. Just look at what this fall has been like so far, some places got frost for the first time this week but others still haven’t, and now we are back to summer time temperatures. I still have one cherry tomato plant producing tomatoes, and I have a foxglove perennial that is blooming now, when they would normally bloom in June. The foxglove is about the only plant that my deer have left alone. 

Regardless of the weather one thing is for sure, the days are getting shorter. The days are still twenty-four hours long, but the amount of daylight affects how we feel. The light is what we, like all things in nature, need. Take a look at bears, this time of the year they are getting ready to slumber in their dens until longer days reappear in the spring. Chipmunks are busy robbing our bird-feeders to store enough seed for the coming long winter. Of course they forget where they stashed their seeds and in the spring we have sunflowers growing everywhere. We don’t hibernate for the winter, we have work to do or school to go to, but many people do suffer from the effects of shorter daylight hours. Mild cases of this have been deemed “seasonal depression” or “seasonal affective disorder (SAD)”. 

Symptoms of SAD may consist of difficulty waking up in the morning, nausea, tendency to oversleep and overeat, especially a craving for carbohydrates, which leads to weight gain, similar to the way bears fatten up for the winter ahead. Other symptoms include a lack of energy, difficulty concentrating on or completing tasks, withdrawal from friends, family, and social activities. Treatments for seasonal affective disorder include light therapy, medication, cognitive-behavioral therapy and carefully timed supplementation of the hormone melatonin, the easiest and safest of which is simple light therapy. For those of you who own chickens and want eggs in the winter, you have been using light therapy all along. You see, chickens need a minimum of twelve hours of daylight to produce eggs, in the winter when daylight is shortened chickens would normally stop laying eggs, but when supplemental light is added they will continue to lay.

The trick is to have lights come on early in the morning, but let them get ready to nest with the natural sunset. Commercial egg producers don’t even have windows in their coops as they control the amount of light all year long. Brightening your day can brighten your spirits as well. We all feel better on a bright sunny day, feeling the rays of sunshine brush upon our skin. What do you do when you want to start seedlings indoors in February? You put them under a grow bulb. I’m oversimplifying a bit, but that same principal can be applied to us as well. So as the days are getting shorter, brighten them up a bit and you may feel a little better about the winter to come, whichever winter we get.