Wednesday, 7:30 AM. 60 degrees, wind W, calm with light gusts. The channel is slightly wrinkled. The sky is blue with a bit of haze and the barometer predicts rain.Along with the barometer, which can predict weather about 12 to 24 hours in advance, I watch certain indicator trees. An old time local fisherman told me some time ago, “when the hillsides turn gray, I head for port.” Certain trees turn their leaves over in anticipation of rain, thereby exposing the stomata on the lighter colored undersides of the leaves to it. This is a subtle indicator and I think must be a response of the leaf petiole to changing barometric pressure. Red maples seem to pretty consistently do this and probably other maples, and maybe poplars and other species as well. The response also seems to vary with individual trees within a species. There is a large red maple in a neighbor's yard that Joan and I use as an indicator of rain and it is consistently accurate. It turns its leaves over about an hour before it rains.
We have available to us a tremendous amount of culturally accumulated and filtered knowledge which we moderns usually ignore as questionable intuition, or worse, superstition and "old wives tales." It behooves us all to give due credit to our own observations and to the accumulated, if “unscientific” knowledge of our collective cultures. To not do so may lead us to “miss the boat,” or worse yet, sink it.
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