Reflections: Predicting the Weather By Chicken

Predicting the Weather By Chicken

On the methods of the Old Farmer's Almanac, and an argument for chickens over groundhogs for predicting spring's arrival

James Fox-Smith

Let’s talk about chickens, since we haven’t done that in a while. High on the chicken’s list of useful attributes is its potential as a harbinger of spring, if the number of eggs mine have begun laying recently is any indication. After a December/January dry spell during which my fifteen-or-so laying hens hardly managed to muster the makings of a respectable omelette, during the second week of February they started making up for lost time. My coop ranneth over, which seemed odd since the weather that week was as cold and wintry as ever. Then suddenly, just days after the eggsplosion began, signs of spring were everywhere. The temperature turned mild and warm, a few early jonquils emerged to turn tentative faces towards the sun, and my wife started carrying a shovel and a bucket around in the back of her car (for clambering in and out of roadside ditches digging up other people’s daffodils). After a pretty chilly January for our part of the world, all the signs point to spring definitely having sprung. And the chickens called it before anyone.

The accuracy of poultry-based weather forecasting makes me wonder why the good people of Pennsylvania continue to place their faith in groundhogs. It also reminds me of a ditty that my English grandfather would recite anytime a few days of unseasonably warm March weather raised his hopes that the interminable Suffolk winter was about to end—then dashed them again as another howling gale blew in from the North Sea.

The spring hath come,

the throstle cried,

But ‘twas the throstle’s blunder.

The snow, it came; it always does,

And snowed the bugger under.

Anytime this happened my grandfather would stare gloomily out at the sleet piling up in his back yard and start muttering about throstles. A “throstle” is an old English word for a song thrush, which is itself an old English bird—one noted for its distinctive, musical song, and its sensible habit of migrating south to the Mediterranean or North Africa to escape the long, English winter. So you can see why the sound of a thrush singing in February or March might fill deep-frozen English people with optimism that spring is about to be upon them. But sadly for deep-frozen English people, song thrushes are apparently no better at vacation timing than Punxatawny Phil is at shadow recognition. The result: enough inaccurate forecasting to result in poetry being written on the subject.

Back to the humble chicken, which in addition to providing us with eggs, improving garden compost, and controlling insect pests, would now seem poised to add long-term weather prediction to its impressive resume. But with the weather turned cold again as I write this, the jury is still out for deliberation. According to the Old Farmer’s Almanac, the last freeze in our part of the world should occur no later than March 8 this year. The Old Farmer’s Almanac relies on a secret formula for compiling long-term weather forecasts, which it has been doing with something like eighty percent accuracy since its founding in 1792. And while the Almanac is famously cagey about how it arrives at its predictions, I have read that observations about sunspot activity, acorn counts, and the thickness of corn husks all affect the formula. Given the name of the publication and the Old Farmers who presumably constitute its audience, it seems likely that the publishers might have thought to cast a glance in the direction of their readers’ chicken coops when making their forecasts, too. Have we stumbled on the secret of the Old Farmer’s Almanac weather forecast? If so, then my chickens’ sudden production increase will have predicted spring’s arrival with a lead time of exactly one month. In the meantime there’ll be omelettes for breakfast, and if the chickens turn out to have jumped the gun, we can always look to the pecan trees as a backup weather prediction plan. If you’ve never heard about that bit of old farmer’s wisdom, I’ll tell you all about it in some other Reflections column.