During my walk this morning along the paved back road north of the Farm, I came to one of those black and orange woolly bear caterpillars on the edge of the road headed across, towards the morning sun. She was moving rapidly in a straight line to the east. I noted where I was and estimated in about 10 minutes I would be coming back past the spot and would see if she had made it to the grass on the other side.
I knew a little about the life cycle of a woolly bear but asked the internet to remind me. “The Isabella tiger moth, also known as the banded woolly bear, has a life cycle of egg, larva, pupa, and adult. The larva, the fuzzy caterpillar, hatches, then overwinters under debris in a frozen state, thawing in spring to feed before pupating in a silk cocoon. After one to three weeks, the adult moth emerges, mates, and lays eggs, starting the cycle anew, often with two generations per year in many regions.”
Woolly Bear males and females look the same but some are male and some female and turn into male and female moths. So my designation as a this one as a female was only when I came back and again met her, this time almost across the road but now headed up the road instead of towards the ditch.
“You have a long walk ahead of you,” I told her, wondering if I should gently pick her up and set her down in the grassy ditch where surely winter cover would be available. Should I intervene like a hands on God rescuing her from possible automobile flattening or should I like the Founding Fathers, many Deists who believed that God created things and then is hands off, leave her to her own devices.
Crossing the pavement for a woolly bear is surely like a human crossing a desert - no water, no food, and as the sun bakes down likely to shrivel one up. And external forces as likely to be an car tire, a hungry bird or death in the desert without the assitance of a benevolent presence from above.
The caterpillar, as we understand, does not think about divine intervention, but goes on her way driven by the genetic patterns to fulfill her life cycle. One can hope she makes it far from the road so the winter snowplow wing doesn’t scrape her winter quarters.
Woolly bears are supposed to predict the winter intensity by their orange stripe on the black body. Sadly the internet says this does not have scientific evidence, but rather the orange and black depends on the age and temperatures she experiences before going into hibernation.
When I was moving some tarps that had been stored away in the garage, I tumbled out several curled up woolly bears, already having nestled down for a long winter’s nap. I felt
bad about forcing them wake up and start all over finding a new winter quarters. That guilt, is what gave me the answer to my road woolly bear, I gently picked her up and carried her far into the ditch beyond the reach of
the snowplow, tell her “if you find your winter bed here, you are between the combine on the soybean field and the snowplow wing . Good luck.”
