When the peacock loudly bawls Soon we’ll have both rain and squalls,
is one such. Virgil’s statement that “the owl” screeches unduly at such a time is supported by modern testimony.
A reasonable explanation of this uneasiness is that it is the effect of that increased electrical tension in the atmosphere that often precedes a shower, to which small creatures are perhaps more sensitive than are men and large animals. It will not do, then, to reject _all_ the weather-signs popularly alleged to be given by animals.
At the same time, as has been suggested, much of the current weather-prophecy relating to animals is silly, such, for example, that a solitary turkey-buzzard seen at a great altitude indicates rain; that blackbirds’ notes are very shrill before rain; that there will be no rain the day a heron flies down the creek; that when woodpeckers peck low on the tree-trunks expect a hard winter. These, and many other nonsensical maxims, are in fact spurious. Most of them, no doubt, were uttered originally in jest, or as a whimsical answer to some inquisitive child, then repeated as amusing, and finally quoted seriously. Others have been brought to us from the old world by early farmer-immigrants—French in Canada, Louisiana and New England, Dutch in New York, Swedish and German in New Jersey and Pennsylvania, Spanish in the Southwest, and so on—and have been applied to our native birds, where often they fail to fit. A saw that perhaps had some value when told of the European robin or blackbird, is ludicrously inappropriate when said of our blackbirds and robins, which are totally different in nature and habits.
One of the most venerable of these worthless prognostics, and one that very likely is a relic of Roman auspices, twenty-five centuries ago, is that of the goose-bone:
“To read the winter of any year take the breast-bone of a goose hatched during the preceding spring. The bone is translucent, and it will be found to be colored and spotted. The dark color and heavy spots indicate cold. If the spots are of light shade, and transparent, wet weather, rain or snow, may be looked for.
“If the November goose-bone be thick, So will the winter weather be; If the November goose-bone be thin, So will the winter weather be.”