You have heard that saying from weather lore that March weather coming “In like a lion, out like a lamb.” March and April in Paradelle are months that are a blurring of seasons.
There are several March weather lore couplets I found: So many mists in March you see So many frosts in May will be. So, count those misty mornings and you will know if May will be more chilly than expected.
A Peck of March-Dust, and a Shower in May Makes the Corn green, and the Fields gay. Dust being light snow and plentiful May rains is good for crops.
March many-Weathers rain’d and blow’d But March grass never did grow. This is a bit unclear. Varied weather this month means the grass won’t grow?
As far as the lion and lamb for the month, it seems obvious that March begins in winter (literally) and ends with spring astronomically. Of course, location changes all that. My end-of-February weather into March weather was cold and rainy. Not a lion, maybe a lion cub, but not a gentle lamb.
So what is the origin of that march weather phrase? I found two possibilities.
The one I find most likely is an astronomical – or probably astrological – explanation. The constellation Leo is the rising sign in March, and by April it is Aries that is rising. Now Aries is a full-grown ram but I suppose “out like a kid” didn’t sound very good.
I also saw a religious explanation that said that Jesus arrives as the sacrificial lamb, but will return as the Lion of Judah. I don’t know the Bible very well but that sounds doubtful for weather lore.
The chances are that March 31 – which this year is Easter – will go out more gently.
With the winter solstice now less than a month away and it feeling on some days here like winter rather than autumn, I look again for the signs in nature that supposedly foretell the winter ahead.
I have written before about the weather lore of the Wooly Bear caterpillar. Woolly bears have 13 segments which are colored black and reddish-brown. Weather lore says that fat caterpillars and the colors of the wooly bear type predict the upcoming winter. The wider a woolly bear’s middle brown section is, the milder the winter. On the other hand, if there is more black than brown, the upcoming winter should prove harsh.
It seems that 8 of 9 of these Paradelle Wooly Bear caterpillars are telling me that it will be a mild winter here. They don’t much care either way because no matter what winter is like this year they will be hiding frozen under leaf litter until spring.
Does frost on the pumpkins mean something about the coming winter?
My post about signs in nature of how intense the winter ahead will be always seem to move back up the stats list around the time of the autumnal equinox, so I’m updating an older post about how October weather supposedly gives us clues about the winter ahead,
My friend, Maria, told me that her Italian mother believed that if there is a bumper crop of acorns in the fall, it means that we will have a bad winter. That’s one of many weather proverbs or nuggets of weather lore.
My mother told me as a child that if leaves hang on in the autumn and are slow to fall, we should prepare for a cold winter. The little scientist in me as a child wondered if it wasn’t just because the fall was gentle and we didn’t have the wind or rain to shake the leaves loose from branches. But then I suppose you could say that a gentle autumn means a tougher winter.
Several bits of weather lore look to October weather to predict the winter to come:
Much rain in October, means much wind in December.
Thunder in the fall is supposed to foretell a cold winter ahead.
A warm October means a cold February.
A Full Moon in October without any frost means a warmer month ahead.
In late autumn and up until the Winter Solstice, flowers still blooming is a pleasant surprise but is supposed to be a sure sign of a rough winter to follow.
The general rule seems to be that a gentle preceding season means a colder one to follow. For example, I have read weather lore that says that a mild winter means a cold spring to come.
Do keep in mind that with all this weather lore, your local observations might be an indication of the local weather ahead and not about the country or the world. I am not a believer in the “official” winter forecasts you often see in the media about the winter ahead. Though they may be “scientific” they are so broad that the microclimates we all live in often are quite different.
There have been several thunderstorms the past week and thunder means lightning. I know lightning is caused by imbalances between storm clouds and the ground, or within the clouds themselves, but part of me is still the child who was fascinated and frightened by it.
My house was hit by lightning when I was 10 years old. It hit our chimney and blew the bricks apart and started a small fire in our attic. The fire department came and doused the fire which was more of glowing wood and insulation than flames but the event had a big impact on me.
I wanted to learn more about these electrical discharges. There are many types of lighting: ball and bead, forked and sheet, superbolts and rocket lightning, crown flashes and anvil crawlers, staccato lightning, ribbon lightning, and more. My parents claimed that when I was a baby ball lightning came through a window of our house, rolled across the room, and exited on the opposite side of the house. I still doubt that but it did send me to books to see if such a thing was even possible.
Humans throughout history have been fascinated and frightened by lightning. It figures in theology and mythology. Those interpretations happened long before science could answer some of the questions about thunder and lightning or even before the two were known to be parts of the same thing.
Even in the era of Sir Isaac Newton (late 1600s and early 1700s) the science of electricity only covered a static charge and it was known as “electric magic.”
I remember reading in some novel about St. Elmo’s Fire which is named after St. Erasmus of Formia (also known as St. Elmo), the patron saint of sailors. It’s not lightning but this weird phenomenon can warn of an imminent lightning strike. This luminous plasma is created by a corona discharge from a rod-like object such as a mast (though it can also be a spire, chimney, or even an animal horn) in an atmospheric electric field. It is interesting that this very strange event was regarded by sailors with awe and sometimes considered to be a good omen.
If you asked most people who is associated with thunder and lightning in religion or mythology, I suspect that Thor would be the top answer. But lightning also appears in the Abrahamic religions, Hindu, Shinto and traditional religions of African tribes.
Lei Gong is the god of thunder in Chinese folklore, and his wife, Dianmu, was the goddess of lightning.
In Native American stories, Thunderbird controlled the upper world and flapped his wings to create thunder to protect humans from the underworld. Lightning shot out of his eyes at the underworld’s monsters.
“If lightning is the anger of the gods, then the gods are concerned mostly about trees.” ― Lao Tzu
As science came into being – and as I got older – we al learned that thunder wasn’t “God bowling” (as I heard in childhood) and lightning was not caused by Thor’s hammer. Colliding particles of liquid – rain, ice or snow – inside storm clouds increase the imbalance between storm clouds and the ground, and often negatively charge the lower reaches of those clouds. Ceratin objects on the ground – especially trees, building steeples (and chimneys!), but also the Earth itself, become positively charged. Nature wants to keep a balance and so a current (lightning) passes between the two charges.
“Computers can deliver nuclear explosions to precisely anywhere on earth. A lightning bolt is made entirely of error.” ― Galway Kinnell
It seems so silly now that church bells forged before science informed us about lightning might have the inscription “Fulgura Frango” (I break up lightning flashes) because it was believed that ringing church bells could ward off lightning strikes. One theory was that ringing bells would change the air’s flow, breaking the lightning’s path toward church towers.
Every child learns at some point about the wise Benjamin Franklin and his foolishly dangerous kite and key experiments from the mid-1700s led him to conclude that lightning was electricity. He soon invented the lightning rod, which actually did save some lives and buildings.
Panorama photo during a lightning storm over Bucharest, Romania
“The difference between the almost right word and the right word is really a large matter—’tis the difference between the lightning-bug and the lightning.” – Mark Twain
Acorns have been bombing my home’s roof and deck and pinging the roof of the metal shed in the backyard heavily since late summer. The quantity of acorns seems to vary from year to year. This year might be what is known as a “mast year.”
I had to look up what a mast year means. The fruits, nuts, berries, and buds produced by trees and bushes are called “mast.” Things like walnuts, pecans, hickory nuts, hard seeds, and acorns are called hard masts, and berries and fruits, and buds are soft mast. A mast year is a year when the amount of that mast is unusually high in number,
Since my first association with the word “mast” is with a sailing ship, I had to check the etymology of this botanical usage. It comes from Middle English and earlier Old English mete similar to mæst in Old High German where it meant food. If you think of an acorn as food (many animals and some humans do) then inside that shell is the meat.
Can we predict these cycles of acorn plenty? Do we know why they occur? There are theories but it is still mostly a mystery.
These mast years seem to occur in irregular cycles of two to five years. An abundance of acorns is often said to be a nature sign of a bad winter. The folk belief is that squirrels, chipmunks, mice and other animals somehow know that they need to stock up for a bad winter and that nature somehow knows to increase the supply chain of acorns. But there’s no real science behind that folk wisdom and weather lore. that they need to stock up. The Farmers’ Almanac – which has lots of folklore around weather – seems to indicate that if acorn numbers mean a bad winter then almost every year is a bad winter.
But I continue and observe and write about signs of the seasons in nature and keep a nature calendar.
Squirrels, mice, chipmunks and deer feed on the acorns in my neighborhood. When the trees produce smaller crops for a few consecutive years, they are in effect keeping the populations of these animals in check. But during a mast year, the trees produce more food than the animals can possibly eat.
This abundance causes a boom in the populations of smaller mammals. It also guarantees that some acorns will survive and grow into new trees. Producing nuts slightly stunts the tree’s growth, but as it happens in cycles the tree gets a chance for growth in the non-mast years. Living things generally live to reproduce.
Chipmunks hibernate in cold weather and so in Paradelle, they spend most of the winter sleeping in their dens. I read that one chipmunk can gather up to 165 acorns in a day. But those cute little Disneyesque critters don’t just eat acorns. Along with seeds and fungi, they will eat grain, fruit, nuts, insects, and worms. I was surprised to find that though they don’t hunt for bird eggs and even nestling birds and baby mice, they will eat them when they find them. They also love to dig in my outdoor potted plants, so cute as Chip and dale might be, they are also pests around here.
In 2020, the chipmunk population locally was insanely large. This year I barely saw any – until the acorns started to fall in late August and now they are all over my backyard and deck. Where were they all spring and summer?
In reading the novel The Overstory by Richard Powers and some other research as a follow-up. I learned a lot about trees. For example, most people probably believe that trees compete with each other for sunlight, water, and nutrients. That isn’t true. In fact, in most settings, they communicate and cooperate.
With acorns, temperature and moisture are probably factors in these cycles, and now it is theorized that oaks might be sending chemical signals to coordinate their production. In my part of the country (Northeast) last winter and spring were generally mild winter and so white and red oak trees are able to produce more of them when they start creating seeds in the spring. A harsh winter or cold spring or freeze can mean little acorn production, or sometimes none at all.
There are still mysteries in all this. How trees communicate with each other is still being explored. We can’t predict when any one species will have a mast year.
but we do better understand what causes it. The weather certainly has a part to play. To produce a healthy crop, the trees need the right combination of temperature and rainfall in the spring.
Phenology is the study of the timing of natural events in relation to the weather. This is the scientific version of weather lore and the studies continue.
SIDEBAR: Can humans safely eat acorns? Yes, they can be used in a variety of ways. They can be eaten whole, ground up into acorn meal or flour, or made into mush to have their oil extracted. Once you’ve safely leached the tannins from your raw acorns, you can roast them for 15 to 20 minutes and sprinkle them with salt for a snack. I haven’t tried eating yet, but maybe this is a good year for it.
Whatever the weather is like the first twelve days of January is supposed to indicate what the weather will be like for the next 12 solar months. Each day equals one month in succession. So, January 6 would predict June’s weather. This is one weather lore predictor that is quite extreme and wholly unscientific – but perhaps fun.
Of course, January would have been the time to pay attention, so I guess I should repost this in January 2022, but you can find your local weather history online since I doubt that anyone recalls what the weather was like in January. You can find information at sites like weather.com
For New Jersey, I went to njweather.org for a recap on this past January’s weather just to see if there was any correlation to this month. I also looked at accuweather.com which told me that on January 6 it was a high of 43 and a low of 32 degrees. That is a normal range for a Jersey January and June was an average Jersey June – which means days in the 70s, 80s and the 90s. It’s a mixed month.
I don’t really think of weather in collective terms like months or even the year. I am more likely to remark about or remember a week. “It was a rainy week.”
Though I occasionally write here about weather lore, I don’t take it very seriously. It is fun and sometimes it happens to match the actual weather, which is why these kinds of beliefs linger on.
A snowy February is supposed to bring a good spring and a mild month means stormy weather for the new season. Compare that to prognosticating groundhogs and other critters.
In any season, a ring around the Moon is supposed to mean precipitation is coming.
If the Moon shows a silver shield, be not afraid to reap your field. I’m not sure what a silver shield on the Moon means – and I have no fields to harvest – so that one I can ignore.
Weekends in Paradelle 