Every winter forecast out there is predicting roughly the same thing. El Niño will not be subtle.
Long before seasonal outlooks, computer models and atmospheric data, people had other ways of figuring out what winter might bring.
They split open persimmons, studied the bands on woolly bear caterpillars and looked to all manner of weather folklore for clues.
Persimmons as meteorologists? Woolly bears divining the winter by the width of their stripes?
Pshaw.
And yet, some people swear by them.
The tradition of reading persimmon seeds is rooted in Ozark and Appalachian folklore. For the seeds to speak correctly, it's important to use seeds from locally grown fruit, the story goes. So this fall ritual won't work in areas where persimmon trees don't grow.
If the kernel is spoon-shaped (think shovel), folklore suggests a snowy winter. A fork shape means powdery, light snow and a mild winter. And a knife-shaped kernel is a warning of icy, cutting winds.
TikTok videos showing persimmon seed predictions reveal regional differences in forecasts.
A livestock feed milling company near Stillwater, Oklahoma, surveyed its employees on what they expected the persimmon to reveal. Spoons appeared, which, coincidence or not, matches official weather agency predictions that El Niño is expected to rearrange storm tracks across the country, generally favoring a more active southern storm track.
Meteorologist Nick Hausen said on Facebook the persimmon seeds have spoken in southern Illinois. When he cracked them open in his back yard, he got a knife, spoon and another knife.
"So apparently the persimmons are calling for plenty of winter in Southern Illinois!" he wrote. "Here's to hoping the persimmon seeds are WRONG!"
Noting the prediction for snow in South Carolina was right last year, Jeremiah Farmer, a Clemson doctoral and master's alum, found mostly knives, a harbinger of a piercing cold winter, when he opened persimmons. He didn't put a lot of stock in the "old-timey" ritual, though.
"Ninety-five percent of the time u do these, no matter the year, they gonna be spoons," he said, adding the shape of the seed likely has more to do with "what kind of summer the persimmon tree went through versus what kind of winter we fixin' to have."
Instagram user Martha Dee Bastin didn't disclose her location in a post that read: "Here is what you've all been waiting for, the winter prediction of the persimmon seed.
"To me, it looks like two spoons and a knife out of three seeds!
"Do with it what you want. I say lots of snow."
The accuracy of the persimmon forecasts is suspect, according to the University of Vermont's Center for Teaching and Learning.
The people sharing pictures of the seeds on social media don't exactly swear by the results, but it's a fun way for family and friends to grumble about the coming winter.
People have been looking at woolly bear caterpillars to tell them what kind of winter lies ahead longer than they've been consulting a groundhog on when it will end.
These caterpillars — actually the larvae of Isabella tiger moths widely distributed in the lower 48 states — are known by different names. In parts of New England and the Midwest, they're known as "woolly bears." In other places, they're known as a "fuzzy bear caterpillar," a "woolly worm" or a "hedgehog caterpillar" because the creature curls into a ball and plays dead when it's picked up or disturbed.
Their credibility as winter prognosticators seems to lie in the fact that they have 13 body segments, said to represent the approximate weeks in winter. It's flimsy scientific evidence but has been a fun bit of folklore since the mid-20th century.
The idea that woolly bear colorings foretell the severity of winter was popularized in 1948 when Dr. Howard Curran, a curator of entomology at the American Museum of Natural History, invited a New York Herald Tribune reporter to tag along on a field study, where he examined the bands on 15 of the caterpillars and made a prediction about winter. The story was picked up by wire services and has since been cemented in Americana.
The woolly bear legend is a bit more involved.
Not only does more black than rust color supposedly mean a severe winter, the position of the longest dark bands is said to indicate which part of winter will be most severe. If the head end of the caterpillar is black, winter will get off to a nasty start. If the tail end is dark, the end of winter will be cold.
Jeremy Landgrebe, chief meteorologist for WXOW News in Minnesota, said in a Facebook post that a woolly bear found on his porch indicated a mild winter ahead.
There are a couple more versions of the story. In some places, it's believed that if the woolly caterpillar seems to have a lot of hair, it's going to be a cold winter. The coat, though, is just nature's way of protecting the caterpillar against the harsh elements of winter. Banded woolly bears can live up to 10 years or for as little as a few months, depending on the species and environment in which they live.
Another version of the legend holds that if the woolly bear is crawling in a southerly direction, it is trying to escape the brutal winter ahead. If the caterpillar seems to be on a northward path, winter will be warm and mild.
While checking woolly worms' bands for hints about the winter ahead is a beloved autumn tradition, the orange stripe reveals more about the caterpillar's past, according to the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service.
A wider orange band simply means the insect had a long, healthy growing season, allowing it to molt more times and grow older before winter hit. To survive the upcoming freeze, these resilient creatures produce a natural antifreeze in their blood, allowing them to freeze completely solid under leaf litter and thaw safely in the spring.
A bumper crop of acorns is often taken as a warning of a hard winter. In reality, oaks undergo masting, producing unusually large crops in some years for biological reasons that don't reliably predict the next winter.
Some areas of North America are experiencing an "acorn apocalypse" this year, according to reports from Virginia, Wisconsin and Canada.
One large oak tree can drop up to 10,000 acorns in a mast year — or between 10 and 15 bushel baskets full — depending on the tree species.
In botany, the term "mast," which comes from the Old English "mæst," describes the phenomenon of boom-and-bust synchronized reproduction among nut- and fruit-bearing trees. Boom times — or mast years — occur every two to five years, with smaller acorn crops in between.
It's not just a few trees here and there, either. A red oak tree in the forests of Upstate New York would hurl an abundance of acorns to the ground at the same time as a red oak tree on the streets of Chicago.
Scientists don't know exactly what's going on.
But here's what's not going on: Mast years are not a harbinger of severe winter. That's just more folklore foolishness, like the misguided notion that woolly bears and persimmons are weather prognosticators.
The phenomenon, which has been casually described as "a time when the oak trees conspire among themselves, and go all out in a nonstop orgy of acorn production," is enduringly fascinating and even mysterious to scientists.
Weather folklore also suggests that thick, tough onion skins mean a cold, rough winter, while thin skins mean a mild one.
Another proverb often attributed to pioneers suggests the height of wild weeds during late summer directly correlates with the depth of winter snowdrifts. "As high as the weeds grow," it goes, "so will the banks of snow."
Leaves hanging on trees late supposedly foretell a severe winter; early leaf drop means a mild one. Leaf timing is actually affected by temperature, daylight, drought and tree health during the current growing season.
Squirrels busily gather and stash a cache of nuts every fall, and there is nothing in their frantic behavior that suggests brutal weather is ahead. It's just normal seasonal behavior.
The location of a hornet nest in a tree is also seen as a harbinger of winter. A high nest supposedly means deep snow; a low one, less snow.
Thick fur on livestock, pets or wildlife is sometimes treated as a cold-winter sign. Coat growth is driven largely by changing daylight and current conditions.
Another bit of folklore says the number of August fogs predicts the number of winter snowfalls. It's a classic piece of weather lore, but there's no meteorological mechanism tying the two together.
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