Gray's River Almanac, Number 4
by Robert Michael Pyle - Lecturer
I'm sure everyone has noticed the many big shaggy caterpillars crossing the highway this month. Folks often ask me about them: What are they, why are they crossing the road, and why are there so many this year? What do they eat, where and when do they make their cocoons? What do they turn into? And do they really foretell the weather? Children everywhere love how Woolly Bears gallumph across the road and curl up in your palm when you pick them up. As Anna Botsford Comstock wrote in her Handbook of Nature Study (1911), "it seems to them a companion of the road and the sunshine; it usually seems in a hurry." But where is it going?
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